This week's Baltimore City Paper has a review of Richard Grayson's With Hitler in New York:
Friday, September 7, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
by Rick Peabody, Jr.
WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK
By Richard Grayson
190 pp. Taplinger, $7.95
If you like Steve Martin, you'll love this book!
Richard Grayson is a 28-year-old word wizard from Brooklyn who packs more laughs into these 27 stories than Martin managed in all of Cruel Shoes. While both men possess wild imaginations, Martin's prose is stiff and semi-literate by comparison.
In Grayson's world, Hitler is resurrected and visiting modern New York; Abe Lincoln hates flapjacks and lies around doing nothing while Stephen Douglas sleeps with Mary Todd; Justice Burger is deluged with fan mail; stories come to live and go to the hospital or bit novelist John Gardner on the leg at a writer's conference. Famous people litter his stories, dropping in and out of outrageous situations. It is the kind of humor that has made Flann O'Brien a cult figure and which has enabled Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew to be the literary hit of the summer.
The "Families" section of the book deals with the stereotypical Jewish family and these stories are the most real, seemingly autobiographical. Grayson weaves the landscape of tradition, and the heartfelt characters together with the absurdities of human relationships, to tell some hard truths in these highly charged tales.
Other standouts in a book of standouts are: a story told through a series of "Classified Personal" ads; "A Note On The Type," which parodies such notes; a story that disintegrates as it progresses; a soap opera starring the author; his notes on the flyleaf; and a fantastic cover.
Very few writers under the age of 30 have had anything published in the New York publishing world. Grayson is the beginning of a whole new wave. He deserves your attention. Steve Martin's book may be at the top of the charts, but if there is any justice in this post-Monty Python world, Richard Grayson will be the next Vice President.
