The key events in [Leonard Michaels' first collection of short stories, Going Places]—usually holocausts in the lives of his protagonists—are indistinguishable from the settings in which they occur. Settings are felt to be a physical extension of the agonized victims who inhabit them. I am constantly reminded by Michaels' emblematic stage sets that no other time and no other place could have fostered precisely the form or quality of torture that strikes the persona dumb, dead, or fiercely awake—excruciatingly alive for the first time…. These are not simply locales, settings—traditional background—ever. Life does not merely occur in these machines, edifices; life transfigures the forms that enshrine its daily happening, the forms merging with the bodies they enclose, altering and entering into their life stream.

In "Going Places," the title story, Michaels realizes a totally plastic, epidermal style. Every sentence is charged with a tactility of phrasing that suggests oddly that words are somehow being alchemized into skin. It is a style that gives new significance, a new literalness, to the expression, he put a skin on everything he said….

In two of the stories, "Crossbones" and "Intimations," Michaels is perhaps inventing a new genre, which may stand in the same relation to the conventional story as does the story, say, to the novella. The short-short form appropriates the compression and density of lyric poetry and brings them into fiction. Only a couple of pages in length, these stories need to be reread many times, and gradually, they leave the reader feeling the sense of totally apprehending complex human alliances—or misalliances—ordinarily possible only in the longer forms. One gets a marvelous grasp of the total life-network of the characters in Michaels' short-shorts, as though the essence of a whole novel has been successfully encapsulated in a couple of pages. Michaels' most impressive device in these stories is the elaboration of a long sinuous "crocodilian" sentence which manipulates syntax to catapult words across gulfs of experience; not unusually, seven or eight transitions—in thought or action—are scaled within a single synchromeshed sentence, a sentence that can shift instantly from high gear to low without friction.

The weaker stories in this volume are the wacky sexual fantasies. In some of them Michaels resorts overmuch to clever stunts. The characters display gimmicky dialogue and quirky personality trappings—nervous tics, limps, mutilations, all manner of Freudian and Reichian hangups—but the varieties of gaminess don't conceal the hollow characterization or the frayed seams in a story's overextended structure. These erotic stories are often wildly funny, but the humor is pitched to a scale of laughter that approximates—in its zany crudeness—the cartoons and jokes one finds in Playboy.

In the better stories of this type, "City Boy" and "Fingers and Toes," Michaels succeeds in burlesqueing the stock responses of slick pornography and achieves erotic satire of unmistakable originality….

Michaels' language is a created, a freshly discovered, idiom revealing the remarkable plasticity of people who are at once trapped—and fantastically bursting alive—in their bodies. The body is always discovered shockingly anew to be the most grotesquely beautiful and delicate of machines; the body, acted upon by the crowded machinery in close quarters of the overpopulated Manhattan, can re-enact through exquisite sexuality—and thereby translate into personality and spirit—the numbingly complex physical intensities and can transform into a reordering synthesis countless and unrememberable daily physical contortions in autos, elevators, and phone booths. Sexuality in the stories assimilates monstrous mental and physical violations of the partner, but transcends them all in a wisdom of the body which can never be learned in any other way, and which must seem—in the world of these stories—to be worth any price that must be paid. (p. 132)