Wyatt Mason on Leonard Michaels

Harper's has a nice essay this month on Leonard Michaels by NBCC Balakian winner Wyatt Mason. You can't get the piece online, but you can read this interview with Mason, which makes, among more serious points, a good case for picking one's roommates carefully:

"I knew nothing of Michaels until 1993, when I was living in New York City. A roommate had Sylvia, Michaels’s second novel, among his books, and I was intrigued by the cover, a pencil sketch of a woman who seemed to be keening while smoking. The pencil drawing, I learned, was a self-portrait by Sylvia Bloch, Michaels’s first wife, about whom the events of the novel turn. Anyway, at 24, this book was properly devastating for me. It was about a young man my age in a marriage that one–at least I–could not fathom. A terrifying struggle, but rendered in a prose as measured as the events it described were not. I had been reading a lot of Nabokov around that time, and Michaels’s approach to style struck me as astonishing. Effect without affect was new to me. An education in every sense, that book. Storytelling with very different aesthetic concerns. "

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