The Yale Review – July 2006

The Yale Review contains fiction, poetry, reviews and essays. The design, by Chip Kidd and Jayme Yen, is simple and unadorned, but eye-catching. Kidd’s imprimatur is noticeable, though it is also noticeably restrained; his transatlantic flights of fancy are shortened to mere layovers.

The Yale Review contains fiction, poetry, reviews and essays. The design, by Chip Kidd and Jayme Yen, is simple and unadorned, but eye-catching. Kidd’s imprimatur is noticeable, though it is also noticeably restrained; his transatlantic flights of fancy are shortened to mere layovers.

The first four poems are quite good, especially the first, “No Good Deed” by Rachel Hadas. Her language and manner are original and striking: “Never touch a stranger! / The blind man’s crazy logic / fits right in with No good deed’s / apotropaic magic.” Hadas doesn’t stoop to modish obfuscation, but rather has the confidence to display her poems as is. Surprisingly, this semi-didactic work, and the next three, are closed form, using stanzaic, metrical and rhyme structure.

The most alluring essay in The Yale Review is “About the Creative Process” by Lukas Foss, which crackles with insight, savvy analysis, and a wide-ranging synthesis of several disciplines. He touches on music, creativity, artistic influence, self-expression, education and other topics, often hopping quickly from one to the other, but without losing the reader’s interest or his line of argument. He’s especially poignant when dealing with the strangely pervasive misconceptions regarding the creation of art. The other essays, however, are rather dull. There’s an unfinished article, by Elizabeth Bishop, about a trip to Brazil with Aldous Huxley, and a very long piece by Fritz Stern, “Family Physicians: My German Past.”

Stern’s essay, which opens the journal, is an account of Breslau Jews and their ever-changing, complicated role in German society. He jumps erratically from one topic to another but, unlike Foss, cannot sustain the reader’s focus or interest. Too much is summarized in too short a space; some of the material is already well known, while other issues need more elaboration. The essay might work better as a book-length study, though the language is pompous and the sentences tend to meander. There’s also a problem with the heroic portrayal of the author’s ancestors, which, lacking any objective third-party evidence, is at odds with the historical integrity of the piece.

Haruki Murakami’s “The Mirror,” newly translated by Philip Gabriel, is rendered in a poised, understated English. The story itself is slight, innocuous, the mere shadow of a narrative, as though the great writer’s name and celebrity were more important than the actual work. “Toast” by Paul West is comparable in style. The writing is refined, sometimes witty and frenetic. There’s very little dialogue or action, though; the story is told almost exclusively through narration and interior monologue, a strategy that grows tedious. “The Abridged Versions” by Peter Cameron is, in many respects, similar, though its technique is more suited to the story’s content and purpose. His writing is playful and entertaining, the words crisp and occasionally startling: “The evening superimposes a nudity on the table lamp, as if it were posing for a pornographic issue of Home and Garden.” Ultimately, though, none of the fiction is a match for the better poems. Cameron’s self-consciously experimental narrative is ultimately derivative and rather predictable, like the zany yet culturally sophisticated gags of Woody Allen in Side Effects.
[www.yale.edu/yalereview/]