[Meyer is an American educator. In the review below, she lauds Leyner's collection of short stories I Smell Esther Williams, finding the prose to be "chaotic and exhilarating."]

[I Smell Esther Williams, a] collection of twenty six short fictions, reads as if Leyner went to sleep or put himself into a trance to write them; they have the same exhilarating mixture of chaos and suggestiveness as sleep-talking. The title is absurdly evocative, a rich joke, but it is only one little monkey in an enormous, crowded barrelful. This has got to be among the funniest, most innovative fiction around. Here is a good sample, the opening to one of my favorites, "A Bedtime Story for My Wife":

The clock on the Hudson City Savings Bank billboard says 6:30, indicating nothing but the hands' exhaustion—it was so thrilling five minutes ago & now that seems like another life, when all the cars accelerated down Newark Avenue like they'd lost their brakes and some of the passengers, some of the women, craned their necks in the wind and their religious medals pulled against their necks and were held rigid in the draft of the wind and the dashboard saints bared their teeth to this speed and the sky went vermillion and then purple and then deep blue and then black like four blinks of the eye and the clock's hands just fell limp …

Almost all of the stories are insanely disjointed on the surface, on the level of logic, but at second glance each is clustered like the petals of some exotic asymmetrical bloom. The internal consistency of the stories originates more out of tone and mood than content. None of them is plotted in any conventional way, yet each is based on a sequence of association that has all the inevitability of a traditional story.

The twenty six of them are constructed in a variety of formats. "Octogenarians Die In Crash" is a play in five scenes. "Blue Dodge" is all in dialogue. "I Smell Esther Williams," the longest, is a collage of random bits and pieces—narratives, sketches, musical notation, movie scripts, and dialogues, such as this one, given here in its entirety, called

TEENAGE CHRIST KILLERS

Mother: Where were you?

Moshe: Out.

Chaim:

Mother: Where!?

Moshe: Just out.

Chaim:

Besides variety in format, there is a "veritable cornucopia" of moods: stories of satire, of sad love, of frustration, of pure joy. The stories are highly topical and outrageously exploit the delicious comedy in the banal reference: Slurpies, mood rings, Maalox, Otis elevators, patio pools. (Yes, it's Donald Barthelme's "dreck" again but without the coyness that sometimes overtakes his writing.) There are innumerable cameo references to the rich and the famous as well. Watch for Ted Kennedy, Johnny Mathis, Carlo Ponti, Brooke Shield's mother and many, many more.

Leyner jimmies open ideas and attitudes that once seemed safely established and sealed in language. There is an endless array of parodies of writing styles—but he has shaken them loose from the burden of content and the presuppositions of values these earlier styles carry.

Susan and Jill were so excited! They'd primped for weeks and the day had finally come! Is there anything more beautiful than a pair of girls consumed by romance! Jill stood in front of the mirror! Her underpants were a "yellow-pages" print! "Howard will flip!" Susan assured Jill!

The stories are finally about language: they are full of unheard-of associations, mixed metaphors by the cascading streamful, fantastic transmogrifications of the familiar into the strange, lists of disparate items held together in newly-invented categories, distortions in space and time (compressions, extensions, negations, telescopings, magnifications, and other perceptual alterations). The book is very rich.

But hasn't it all been "done before," as certain more traditional critics allege when they attempt to discredit this kind of writing (a strange condemnation, isn't it, to come from those who uphold literary tradition)? The answer is yes, of course, and so has the criticism of this kind of writing been "done before." Recall the famous condemnation of John Donne's poetry by Samuel Johnson. "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together," he complained (as he probably does right now, wherever he is, about Leyner). Here was T.S. Eliot's classy reply two centuries later: "But a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet's mind is omnipresent in poetry." And against the charge that Donne's poetry is "artificial," Eliot answered, "The effect, at its best, is far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray" (or, in Leyner's case, than a short story by Hawthorne). When Eliot rebuts Johnson's charge that Donne's style was too complex, he answers for Leyner as well: "It is to be observed that the language of Donne is as a rule simple and pure…. The structure of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but that is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling." And finally here is Eliot's exhortation—which Leyner has already heeded—about the need to bind experience and language:

Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language into his meaning.

But it is only an academic exercise to connect Leyner to his predecessors. It is much more interesting in his case to look ahead than behind because his work points so confidently toward the future of fiction.