[In the following review, Allen provides an overview of Calisher's literary career and offers a positive evaluation of In the Slammer and The Novellas of Hortense Calisher.]

Hortense Calisher, who was born in 1911 and has been producing highly original and frequently highly acclaimed fiction for half a century, is the odd-woman-out of the contemporary American literary pantheon. There’s no entry for her in the most recent Britannica, and not so much as a mention in Frederick Karl’s numbingly comprehensive American Fictions: 1940–1980, published in 1983. One looks in vain through critical studies of novelists and story writers from the fifties to the present day for even token consideration of a writer who has often (if inconsistently) excelled in both genres—whose 1975 Collected Stories was in fact generally acclaimed by reviewers as one of the finest such collections of our time.

Furthermore, Calisher’s standing in the rarefied world of her peers seems well-nigh impeccable. She has served as president of both American PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and done a cultural tour of Japan under the aegis of the State Department (a junket amusingly described in her 1972 memoir Herself, which was nominated for a National Book Award). If the range and density of her sixteen novels and novellas and fifty-something short stories make it difficult to classify her, she deserves respect for her incomparable verbal ingenuity—in her preface to the Collected Stories, Calisher defined the short story as “an apocalypse, served in a very small cup”—even from those impatient with her fiction’s leisurely pacing and byzantine complexity.

Calisher’s most imaginative novels—such as her hilarious interplanetary jeux on the reversibility of male and female social and sexual roles (Journal From Ellipsia, 1965) and her visionary portrayal of a European-born doctor whose experience of post-sixties America convinces him that the human race is moribund (Standard Dreaming, 1972)—feature arresting conceptions shrouded in dense folds of clotted rhetoric that sometimes prevents a reader from understanding who is talking to whom or what is being described.

Nor have Calisher’s recent novels moved her any closer to the mainstream. The ambitious Mysteries of Motion (1983) explores in distractingly meticulous detail the past lives and present interrelationships of six passengers aboard the first civilian space shuttle headed for a habitat Out There in the stars. In the Palace of the Movie King (1993), unfortunately failing to live up to its lovely title, offers an incomprehensibly attenuated portrayal of a gifted film director who escapes a European Communist state (recognizably Albania) for the imperfectly fulfilled promise of artistic and romantic freedom in the West. (A single exception was The Bobby-Soxer, a charming 1986 fictional reminiscence of growing up virginal and not at all pleased about it in the fifties, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and may be her most accessible book.)

These estimable works indeed contain multitudes, but only the most disciplined and diligent reader is likely to tolerate the intricately layered analyses of personality, motivation and memory that complicate and impede the progress of Calisher’s narratives. Such is the case, alas, with the novel she published earlier this year, In the Slammer With Carol Smith—a thinly dramatized portrayal of its protagonist twenty years after her naïve involvement with a radical student group altered the course of her life and left her—middle-aged, unskilled and reluctant to communicate with her exhausted “SW” (social worker)—a creature of the New York City streets, resigned to solidarity with the denizens of a condemned storefront.

In the Slammer frustrates with its abrupt shifts from first-person to omniscient narration and profusion of imperfectly realized scenes. But the novel is not without rude wit and feisty compassion, and it really is rather remarkable that a writer who will turn 86 this year once again proves herself to be so interested in and alertly attuned to the details and rhythms of contemporary life.

This is one of Calisher’s distinctive strengths: not just the ability but, one infers, the need to imagine the quality of lives that are categorically, dangerously, seductively different from one’s own. This exploratory sensibility emerges even in her early stories depicting a sheltered Southern-Jewish childhood troubled by intuitions of nearby social and racial unrest; figures prominently in the choice of unfamiliar “worlds” examined in her major novels; and reaches a crescendo in what is for me her single most artful and powerful story, “The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street,” in which a reclusive widow is shocked out of the protective enclosure of her city apartment by an indistinct wail from the mean streets below: a cry of fear and confusion from a voice that she knows in her bones is an echo of her own.

Calisher is at her best in the shorter forms, which she expertly distinguishes (in the Modern Library’s new collection of her Novellas) from the long novel’s tendency to “ramble the world’s scenery, seductive with digression. … [and, when imperfectly executed,] suffer from ideas made to walk like people.” “Something in a novella,” she declares, “says Stop. Leaving the people … in hiding, but On View.”

It’s a persuasive aesthetic, even if it doesn’t altogether apply to her own short novels, seven of which are included in this welcome if curiously assembled collection. It opens, most promisingly, with Tale for the Mirror (1962), a gently ironic study of cultural and ethnic misunderstanding set (as is the bulk of Calisher’s fiction) in upstate New York. The specific locale is an old-moneyed, ingrown village on the Hudson River that is disturbed by the arrival of a Hindu “neurologist” and celebrity, Dr. Bhatta, who has obtained possession of a lavish estate by means presumed suspect by the wary neighbors, who wonder what to do about his entourage of subservient females, the grateful client-disciples who “when they are grateful … give gifts,” and the apparent madwoman living in his summer house. It’s a deliciously observed, neatly plotted story very effectively told from the viewpoint of a thoughtful lawyer who never does decide whether his exotic new townsman is a “swindler” or only, like the lawyer himself, a man who arranges the facts of his life into a story he can tell to the face he must confront in the mirror.

The “Something” that should say “Stop” doesn’t say it quickly enough in Extreme Magic (1964), a talky portrayal, reminiscent of Henry James at his most over-elaborate, of Guy Callendar, who has lost his family in an automobile accident and tries to reconstruct his life as a small-town antiques dealer. Guy is drawn into a flirtation with a dangerously forthright young girl, and finds the understanding that she cannot give him with a neighbor woman burdened with a suicidal husband. But the story fails to engage us, because Calisher gives too much weight to its extraneous supporting details and too little to a central character, whom we don’t know well enough to feel any real sympathy for.

The Man Who Spat Silver (1986) makes mountainous molehills out of the coy exchanges between a professional translator who escapes her daily “solitude” by taking long walks through New York’s streets and a salesman who attracts her attention by the unremarkable expedient of spitting on the sidewalk. The conception is trivial, and neither character is sufficiently believable to sustain our interest in a story whose expectorations, one might say, are not fulfilled.

Women Men Don’t Talk About, previously unpublished, offers an amusing composite portrait of an Irish-American family transplanted to Southern California, and contains an ingenious plot twist: The middle-aged poet that Ailsa McCoy brings home after hearing his public reading turns out to be her mother’s old acquaintance and just possibly Ailsa’s long-absent father. But Calisher subsumes the agreeable comic particulars in a fog of sexual recombinations that, finally, conceals from us precisely who has been faithful or unfaithful to whomever and to what degree. This is the frustrating torso of what might have been a fine novella.

Saratoga, Hot (1985) is much better. In following the fortunes and obsessions of a married couple who are passionate devotees of horse racing, Calisher creates both a psychologically rich portrayal of its protagonist, a woman painter crippled in an accident and healed, as it were, by her fascination with the variously criminal types she and her husband encounter, and a vivid tableau populated by Damon Runyonesque touts, jockeys, aficionados and mafiosi. It’s one of the best examples of Calisher’s ability to enter a totally unfamiliar world and render it with generous specificity.

Though it’s less successfully realized, The Last Trolley Ride (1966) is one of her most interestingly conceived novellas, and has the virtue of being written in clear, straightforward prose. It’s set in the village of Sand Spring, New York, in the late twenties, and concerns the relations among two unmarried sisters, Emily and Lottie Pardee, and the two “mates” (both named Jim: It seems no Calisher story can forgo a central complication set forth to challenge the reader’s patience) who court and marry them. The story is graced by a wonderfully replete picture of the life of a hamlet in transition to the modern age (thanks to the coming of a trolley line, an enterprise in which both Jims are crucially involved), but succumbs to needless puzzlings as what ought to be its resolution draws near, and, after more than a hundred pages, the reader is still unable to answer conclusively several teasing questions: Did one Jim father one or more of the other’s children, and why; and which is telling the story (forty years afterward, to “their” grand-children), or are they telling it together in a single compound voice?

One turns with relief to the novella originally published as its companion piece, The Railway Police (1966). This is the dazzling story, told in her own wry first-person voice, of a social worker’s frustrated progression through a series of admiring men attracted by the colorful wigs she wears, then repelled by the fact of her baldness (from a hereditary disease). One day, upon seeing an obviously homeless man ejected from a train, she throws away her piles of fake hair, gives all her money to her indigent clients and goes forth to sleep in the streets, embracing the anonymity of those who have been discarded, as she now discards herself (“I wasn’t out to be a heroine. … I just wanted to be ordinary”).

Here, surely, is the tension that animates—and, all too often, encumbers—Hortense Calisher’s ambitious, provocative, exasperating fiction. This is a writer who wants to sleep in the skins of the denizens of the streets and beasts of the field; to go everywhere, be Everyman and understand everything. Her apocalypses don’t always fit snugly inside the teacups of her short stories, or even the eccentrically constructed china closets of her novellas and longer novels, but at their best they take us far beyond the confines of our own imaginations and deep within the convoluted and courageous mysteries of their own artful motions.