Leonard Michaels wrote that “The ability to tell a story, like the ability to carry a tune, is nearly universal and as mysteriously natural as language.” Importantly, he added, “Though I’ve met few people who can’t tell stories, it has always seemed to me they really can but refuse to care enough, or fear generosity, or self-revelation or misinterpretation…or intimacy.”
When you think about The Nachman Stories by Leonard Michaels, it’s easy to see that he didn’t fear generosity or self-revelation or intimacy. Not a bit.
These stories are about one Rapahel Nachman–an austere unassuming mathematician. A sensible, simple guy–quite different from the panoply of characters in Michaels’ earlier story collections. And anyone familiar with his work will find the tone to be different, the mediated prose to be notable. Nachman is aware of his flaws and frailties, but he’s okay with that. We find in the stories, moments when he is in awe of his surroundings–of places and other people.
He is someone who likes what he likes. An inciting incident moves him to try something out of character. It changes him–some misdeed or unkindness–but he remains essentially Nachman.
Elsewhere Leonard Michaels described that a central problem in storytelling is “how to make transitions into transformations. He said that transitions are about “logic, sincerity, boredom,” but that transformations “belong to art.” He said that the most impressive stories include transformations where nothing changes.
Here again, with Leonard Michaels’ story, we see how true this idea is, how it emerges so plainly in a story like “Cryptology” where Nachman is out of his element, in a new town and then thrust into a very unusual and unlikely situation. There are many shifts in the story–explosive ones and unexpected ones that seem impossible to come back from. But Nachman returns to himself in ways that are unexpected. If, as Leonard Michaels said, the most impressive stories include transformations where nothing changes, “Cryptology” is truly sublime.
Leonard Michaels is the author of “Cryptology” and “Murderers.”
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