The Melting Pot and Other Subversive Stories - Hardcover

This skillful collection reconfirms Schwartz's keen ear for dialogue and astute, multilayered portraiture of people and places. Schwartz (Disturbances in the Field, etc.), whose hallmark is realistic, recognizable characters, here explores the fluid tenuousness of identity. The lusty protagonist of "The Infidel," a successful artist, believes he is a reverent worshipper of women but is, in fact, seeking affirmation of self through a succession of lovers. In the title story, the malleable Rita, an immigration lawyer, who "is used to reminding people of someone, and to being loved as a link to the true loved one," masquerades in the clothing of her lover's dead wife. In the affecting "The Sound of Velcro," a discontented yuppie longs for a simpler life and imagines what it would be like to be retarded like his brother. The narrator of "So You're Going to Have a New Body!," a graphic story that may repel some readers, undergoes a hysterectomy that triggers a sexual-identity crisis. Reality is jarred in "The Last Frontier" and "Killing the Bees." In the former, a homeless black family surreptitiously lives on the TV set of a black situation comedy; in the latter, a routine insect extermination at Ilse's comfortable American home summons up her father's long-ago death in a Nazi concentration camp.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The author of Acquainted with the Night ( LJ 7/84) here contemplates issues of identity, discontent, boredom, and fidelity in marriages and relationships. In "The Infidel," a womanizing artist reflects at mid-life on his hollow worship of the institution of love; the title story concerns a young immigration lawyer confronting the ambiguity of her half-Jewish, half-Mexican heritage and love of an East Indian widower. Schwartz's satire is meditative and somber: a black family finds itself living surreptitiously on the set of a TV sitcom; a woman copes numbly with the trauma of hysterectomy. When Schwartz delves deeply, the result is often a despair that cannot be resolved. Mary Soete, San Diego P.L.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.