The cover of Francis Levy’s collection of oddball tales of contemporary living depicts a drawing of the back of a nondescript character calmly looking at a huge colored circle of a cockroach. It’s a fit illustration for a book called The Kafka Studies Department. But as the title story makes clear, the situations in which Levy’s characters find themselves are Kafkaesque, not about Kafka – which means they are both real and surreal, the characters accepting, even welcoming their peculiar fate. The title story, the first in the collection, begins this way: “All the faculty of the Kafka Studies Department were withdrawn, retiring individuals who’d had troubled relationships with their fathers, and hence authority, all their lives” – “rail-thin, bespectacled creatures, “ Levy calls them, who “live alone in off-campus housing usually reserved for graduate students.” Enter bombastic Alfred and insecure Martin, two of the department’s students – complete opposites, Alfred being everything the department should revile and Martin, being almost a Kafka clone. But it’s Alfred who becomes the darling of the department, indulging in “manipulations, seductions, and chicanery.” Martin despises him, but when Alfred suddenly dies, Martin morphs into another Alfred.
Sketches more than stories, the 30 short tales suggest parables but deliberately have no lessons or guidance to impart. The last one “The Afterlife,” is set in a distant future when the main character finally realizes that psychoanalysis is useless, though he has been indulging in it for years. The stories inexplicably turn on failure that can suddenly yield success and success that can induce misery, which was where the characters started from in the first place. Several interrelated tales feature someone known as Spector, but they don’t really relate to one another, other than by way of an occasional cross reference, but that’s the point. What relates? What matters? Irony rules. Here’s the beginning of “Good Times” –“Spector lived for the day he would prove himself to all the people who had ever disdained him. But when the day finally came – midway in the journey of life – they were all either dead or so destroyed that there was hardly anyone left to impress.”
Opening lines are tersely crafted as weird once-upon-a-times. The Healer” begins this way, “Many years after Frieda stopped seducing the husbands of her best friends, she set out to find the people she had hurt.” In the process, she becomes an arbitrary, highly regarded dispenser of wisdom. The two-page tale “The Collectors,” a gem of reversal, features a husband and wife who live entirely to photograph their children, to the exclusion of actually knowing them and having memories. Until disaster hits.
The pencil sketches by Levy’s wife, Hallie Cohen, who also did the cover, have caption lines from the stories, but they hardly reflect the humor and estrangement of the tales, which is also Levy’s point. Knowledge is not power, power is not power. Life is irrational or accidental or both. We drift victims, victimizers. A collection for our time.
I’m jb
