Books in Brief: The Unknowable Light of the Alien

The Unknowable Light of the Alien, by Stanley Nelson (Smith Publishers, 5 Beekman Street, New York, N. Y. 10038; 182 pp., $5). The extraordinary image of Brooklyn that Stanley Nelson delivers in this selection of his stories is a microcosm of the various cultures—Southern or West Indian Black, Hassidic, Armenian which flicker and glow in their respective niches throughout the labyrinth that Brooklyn continues to present. Unlike the various troubadours of Brooklyn who wrote as long-time occupants—notably Betty Smith in her arboreal Williamsburg—Stanley Nelson proclaims and celebrates, not from this or that ethnic cranny, but from the thick of Brooklyn’s ancient warren, its aromatic honeycomb of neighborhoods and personalities. Yet, the path along which his voice guides us is not one of domestic frustrations, nor of sociological glumness. His is the voice of an imagination keyed to the peculiarly eccentric show of history-alive that Brooklyn—in a raffish, fugitive, all but unique way, I should guess, among Eastern cities—can offer. His voice is generally eager, lightly sardonic, often musing or somewhat harassed, but never soured or incurious, unfailingly at the service of his discoveries. These six novellas—“Seeing,” “Cousin Everett,” “It Was,” “Again,” “Early On,” and “The Safed Conspiracy”—are like the stanzas of a long picaresque narrative poem, engaging helter-skelter quests and pursuits both exhilarating and nightmarish, the reconvening of past images or figures, and a pilgrimage. In story after story we confront an ongoing spectacle of unlikely aspects and sudden, dreamlike tonal variations – the very sort one can still encounter, at times, by turning a corner from one Brooklyn block into another. The exotic flares again and again, even in what initially seems the murmuring, familiar-toned boyhood reminiscence of “Early On,” from which suddenly issues a black priest doing Fats Waller riffs on his church organ. The essential professionalism of Nelson’s voice —his sense of his own grace and amassed experience—is what rescues these stories from the jaunty frippery of the syndicated columnist: the search-for-identity fable takes on a sense of cultural range, of intellectual and spiritual possibility. And in the last story, “The Safed Conspiracy,” Nelson makes an excursion into the legend-rich and dynamic culture of Sixties Israel. The verse-fugues of the preceding stories yield to the more methodical tempo of prosenarrative paragraphs, while the hero himself sheds some of the ambiguities of his previous role as major-domo of an illusion-breeding Brooklyn. Here, as he seeks out his transplanted, married daughter and her Israeli friends, the stylistic authority assumes a more sturdy dimension, a new perspective of this poet’s poetic history.

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Donald Phelps

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The Unknowable Light of the Alien, by Stanley Nelson (Smith Publishers, 5 Beekman Street, New York, N. Y. 10038; 182 pp., $5). The extraordinary image of Brooklyn that Stanley Nelson delivers in this selection of his stories is a microcosm of the various cultures—Southern or West Indian Black, Hassidic, Armenian which flicker and glow in their respective niches throughout the labyrinth that Brooklyn continues to present. Unlike the various troubadours of Brooklyn who wrote as long-time occupants—notably Betty Smith in her arboreal Williamsburg—Stanley Nelson proclaims and celebrates, not from this or that ethnic cranny, but from the thick of Brooklyn’s ancient warren, its aromatic honeycomb of neighborhoods and personalities. Yet, the path along which his voice guides us is not one of domestic frustrations, nor of sociological glumness. His is the voice of an imagination keyed to the peculiarly eccentric show of history-alive that Brooklyn—in a raffish, fugitive, all but unique way, I should guess, among Eastern cities—can offer. His voice is generally eager, lightly sardonic, often musing or somewhat harassed, but never soured or incurious, unfailingly at the service of his discoveries. These six novellas—“Seeing,” “Cousin Everett,” “It Was,” “Again,” “Early On,” and “The Safed Conspiracy”—are like the stanzas of a long picaresque narrative poem, engaging helter-skelter quests and pursuits both exhilarating and nightmarish, the reconvening of past images or figures, and a pilgrimage. In story after story we confront an ongoing spectacle of unlikely aspects and sudden, dreamlike tonal variations – the very sort one can still encounter, at times, by turning a corner from one Brooklyn block into another. The exotic flares again and again, even in what initially seems the murmuring, familiar-toned boyhood reminiscence of “Early On,” from which suddenly issues a black priest doing Fats Waller riffs on his church organ. The essential professionalism of Nelson’s voice —his sense of his own grace and amassed experience—is what rescues these stories from the jaunty frippery of the syndicated columnist: the search-for-identity fable takes on a sense of cultural range, of intellectual and spiritual possibility. And in the last story, “The Safed Conspiracy,” Nelson makes an excursion into the legend-rich and dynamic culture of Sixties Israel. The verse-fugues of the preceding stories yield to the more methodical tempo of prosenarrative paragraphs, while the hero himself sheds some of the ambiguities of his previous role as major-domo of an illusion-breeding Brooklyn. Here, as he seeks out his transplanted, married daughter and her Israeli friends, the stylistic authority assumes a more sturdy dimension, a new perspective of this poet’s poetic history.