Daniel Fuchs

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In the Beginning, Williamsburg

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["The Apathetic Bookie Joint" is] a collection of those stories the author wishes most to preserve, and a hitherto-unpublished Hollywood novella, "Triplicate." The first of these stories appeared in The New Yorker in 1938, and the last in Commentary in 1975. They begin, as did Mr. Fuchs himself, in Williamsburg. Brooklyn…. And they culminate in affluent Beverly Hills…. (p. 9)

Mr. Fuchs seems to appear as himself, or an only thinly disguised character, in all these stories, the best of which are the early ones, deeply rooted in Williamsburg. These stories are prescient, laconic and poignant. They speak of sour barbers, forlorn bookies, bankrupt butchers and foolish fat girls driven to pretending to their boyfriends that they're going to vacation in Maine, with a rich and desirable Mr. Charming, when in fact they're only going to spin out yet another unfulfilling day at a married sister's bungalow in Rockaway.

The girls in the Hollywood stories are no longer fat. They are described as uniformly beautiful, but remote. They no longer escape the sweltering city on rooftop deck chairs, but instead cavort mindlessly at Beverly Hills poolsides. And the men, rather than feeding on fantasies, pretending to be somebody of importance on a plane trip, are now able to act them out, producing, directing or writing movies. This, incidentally, is not to suggest that Beverly Hills starlets, or hustling producers, are not as worthy a subject for fiction as the small losers of Williamsburg. It's just that another neglected novelist of the period, Nathanael West, found his natural material there but not Daniel Fuchs. (pp. 18, 20)

The novella at the heart of the collection, "Triplicate," is a curiously meandering affair, a piece that reads like the first draft for something much more ambitious. The Hollywood stories seem tired, defeated, with the shining exception of "The Golden West," a story of some resonance. These stories, to pinch a phrase from Mr. Fuchs, do not suggest an artist who is testing his limits. Their chief interest is that they were composed by the same man who once put us in his debt writing the Williamsburg novels. (p. 20)

Mordecai Richler, "In the Beginning, Williamsburg," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1979 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), November 11, 1979, pp. 9, 18, 20.

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