Today's
Los Angeles Times devotes its book review to Richard Grayson's
With Hitler in New York:
The Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, July 17, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
A Parade of Jewish Relatives
By Stuart Schoffman
With Hitler in New York and Other Stories by Richard Grayson (Taplinger, $7.95)
How to get a bead on Richard Grayson, the young Brooklynite who here offers 27 eccentric but noteworthy short stories? Yes, his fiction is experimental, which is to say it displays only selective respect for literary conventions and tends to be published in magazines with names like Confrontation and Bellingham Review. Genre aside, however, Grayson often resembles an astigmatic photographer who, searching desperately for the focus, twists his lens this way and that, finding a good setting only at random moments.
A telling detour en route to the stories: On the book's front flap, Grayson playfully confers responsibility for Jewish-American culture (which includes Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Al Jolson and "a certain kind of vulgarity typified by the town of Woodmere, Long Island") upon the bomb-wielding anarchist who assassinated Czar Alexander II in 1881, thus provoking the wave of anti-Semitism that swept millions of Jews to America. "So if you have any complaints about 'With Hitler in New York,'" he writes, "address them to the anarchist. . . I take no responsibility for this whatsoever."
Parlorful of Relatives
We thus anticipate a satirist but encounter instead a coy but compulsive autobiographer with a parlorful of predictable Jewish relatives, all the way up to Great-Grandma Chaikah who watches Dinah Shore. Grayson sketches his kin with the customary mix of scorn and love, but to make them as fascinating to us as they apparently are to him, he needs to work harder. And it is not enough to portray the young artist as soap-opera protagonist, as the author does in many stories. Alexander's anarchist may have made Richard Grayson inevitable, but he did not make him special
What is special, though, is Grayson's gift for dreaming up outrageous premises. In the title story, a frolicsome Fuehrer lands at Kennedy on a cut-rate Laker flight, sips an egg cream, pushes his American girlfriend into a swimming pool. "'You're a sadist, you know that?' Ellen says to Hitler."
Or consider "Chief Justice Burger, Teen Idol":
"COMING NEXT MONTH….
EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT WARREN BURGER!
– Secret facts
– Complete judicial record
– How to make him love you."
But the Burger-as-Travolta gags go on and on, interchangeably, and next comes a piece in which Abraham Lincoln is "a big klutz" who hates to shave and complains that he's sick of flapjacks. After reading a lame spoof of those bisexual-albino-seeks-same personal classifieds, we begin to suspect that Grayson is shaking funny ingredients together like dice; by the odds, good numbers will sometimes come up.
Story as Character
The most affecting piece in the collection is a wry and self-knowing one entitled "But in a Thousand Other Worlds," in which the main character is the story itself. Rejected by the New Yorker, then the Atlantic, the story is rushed to Coney Island Hospital, where its condition is diagnosed as hopelessly unpublishable. "Richard's face was buried in his hands. 'I never gave it the care I should have,' he said."
We are hardly surprised to arrive at the rear dust-jacket flap and discover that Grayson's stories "have appeared in more than 125 literary magazines over the past seven years." Conservatively assuming one story per magazine, that comes to an average of a story every three weeks. If the author could just slow down, his talent might seem far less of a blur.
Schoffman is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
The Penn State Daily Collegian reviews Richard Grayson’s With Hitler in New York on page 15 in its September 19, 1979 issue:
Rapid-fire style
‘Hitler in New York’: Notes from the front
By MARK VANDINE
Daily Collegian Staff Writer
“With Hitler in New York” and other stories by Richard Grayson, Taplinger, $7.95, 190 pages.
Richard Grayson teaches at a college I’ve never heard of. The slipcover for this book boasts that his stories have appeared in more than 125 literary publications, none of which I’ve ever heard of, either. And, unfortunately, he writes stories that, for the most part, I won’t ever remember.
Grayson uses a rather set reserve of subjects to write about: old people (mostly grandparents), death, sex and being a very unspecial person.
Nothing wrong with that list of subjects, except they’ve all been given the literary work-over several times. Nothing wrong with that either, but you’d think that if a writer was going to try a used subject he’d try a new angle. That is what’s wrong here.
Grayson has an interesting rapid-fire style, but he doesn’t say much worth reading. He’s mastered the basic points of prose only to discover that he hasn’t got anything to say.
This problem is further frustrated by what seems to be a conflict of motives.
Grayson will have his moments as a successful comic (for example, in a piece called, “Chief Justice Burger, Teen Idol”) or as an analytical observer of people and events, but sometimes he doesn’t seem to know what he wants the story to do. Should it be funny? Should it have a message? He seems confused or, what may be worse, he may be trying to do both, a job for writers of higher caliber.
Grayson’s efforts are further hampered by his tendency to present as stories what seem to be more like plot outlines for what will eventually be stories.
He will introduce a situation, sprinkle in a few quickly introduced characters and proceed to have them interact. There is no meat here. Whey do they do what they do? Why do they say what they say?
Certainly some degree of this can be implied, but Grayson brings the reader in too close too fast. If he wants us to note the quirks in a character’s behavior his attitudes, we simply need to know more. Without the background, the reader is left with a blank check for the story’s message.
These flaws (or perceived flaws, if you want to be fair) are characteristic of fully two-thirds of the stories contained in this book. The remaining third does work, and they work well. They may not completely justify the cost of the book, but they do go some of the way toward indicating a promising new American writer.
