In the Mouth

I have finished reading Eileen Pollack's collection of stories and novellas, In the Mouth, and this, I suppose, is a minor plug for an old friend I am proud to know.

The writing is wry and spare and rueful and what she writes about is both funny and sad, as we pass between the subjective impossibility of hope and inevitability of despair, all in the midst of the longing for love, and the memory of it, but in which what had seemed impossible becomes inevitable, and the reversal is not through anyone's choice, but is visited upon them, as in the transforming and unexpected insight in the final paragraphs of Beached in Boca.

I suppose I am inclined to see a philosophical insight here, in the idea of such a transformation of perspective, a perspective which had seemed before no less than an objective description of the facts, but there is no ponderous articulation of a position or doctrine, simply a possibility shown. As Nietzsche remarked, our estimations of the value and purpose of life are simply symptomatologies of the emotions, and Eileen traces the passage and progress of perspectives through the movement of the symptoms, as it were.

And her ear is so acute, not just for the speech patterns of this anthropologically curious little group of Florida Jews that she knows so well, and the subleties of their inflections, but most of all for the failures of comprehension, for the perplexing to and fro and back and forth of inner dialogue and outward demeanour, between old friends, or potential lovers, or father and daughter, who can see in each other only the public demeanour but cannot hear the dialogue, the mutual awareness and insight that cannot be conveyed from the one to the other, except that she has supplied both dialogues in a spirit of irony that makes you weep, and then the swift and nervous little gestures of love and need, and then the desolation of the old widower: wild, old widowers whom you shouldn't really let out of your sight. It's about dentists, there were never such dentists in Britain ... despite what you say.