I stumbled upon Eleanor Lerman’s work while
searching the Empty Sink Publishing Company’s webpage looking for a place to
submit one of my short stories. I clicked on ‘Fiction’ just to familiarize
myself with what they publish. I randomly chose Lerman’s The Lightship. I was hooked. The writing intrigued me: literary
fiction without the enviable prose that describes something so beautifully but
really doesn’t have much to carry the story forward. I enjoy this kind of
prose. I do. But I found Lerman’s descriptions to be, well, intelligent, for
lack of a better word.
From The
Lightship: (Ed is a cancer survivor who has just attended a rather boring
support group.)
“As Ed ate his lunch, he distanced himself from
his reaction to the survivor’s group that morning. The idea of the body’s
metamorphosis from the familiar form that encapsulated the self into a kind of
ghost-like decay seemed a little less threatening—a little less that had to be
dealt with in the immediate present—now that he was out of that depressing
basement, relaxing in the sunshine that lit up the world this early afternoon.
But thoughts of body and self led him back to his conversation
with Mary last night, and her suggestion that the mind—and hence, the
self—might not actually be anchored within the body, at least, not in the
brain.”
I like this story so much that looked for and
found a link to Eleanor Lerman’s webpage and found what I’d hoped to find—a
novel. I read an excerpt of Radiomen
and immediately downloaded it from Amazon. I knew that I was going to gobble
this book up and I did. The only thing I’m going to tell you about it is there
are aliens among us. To tell more would ruin the story. I gave it a FIVE star
review because everything worked. The book is brilliant and intelligently
written and holds conflict and suspense, but it’s genre is not sci-fi. It’s
literary fiction that’s not stuffy or fluffy. I highly recommend it!
Joan Baum an NPR Reviewer wrote, “…Raidomen may
be science fiction but, hardly, a predictable or typical example of the genre,
it may well appeal to those who think they would never read such pop-lit and
enjoy it.”
From Radiomen
chapter ten, where the protagonist and a friend return to Greenwich Village, a
location where both had previously lived.
“From the far west side, near the river, where
the Socialist Workers Party had had their headquarters and turned out political
tracts on mimeograph machines, to radical book stores and chess clubs and
coffee bars, Jack, in particular, seemed to have a geography in his head that
had been overlaid by a new grid of streets, new buildings, and a new millennial
affluence that had turned old neighborhoods into fashionable quarters,
unaffordable to most of their original residents. But he didn’t seem overly
nostalgic about any of this, just interested in how time and change fought with
memory to establish precedence. Which was more real: the village he
remembered—more gay than straight, more hipster-friendly than home to
fashionistas, more hole-in-the-wall than penthouse in the sky; or where we
often had to make a reservation at some tiny restaurant on Bedford Street, or
Jane or Great Jones or Little West Twelfth because the rich and famous (or just
plain rich) were edging us out of all the places like Jack and I used to take
for granted as being ours?”
Eleanor Lerman is a native New Yorker and
unrepentant member of the Woodstock Nation. She has also been a guide in a
Chinese museum, the manager of a harpsicord kit workshop, and a comedy writer.
Connections between the humor of the human condition and the mysteries of
infinity are the hallmark of her nearly forty-year-long writing career, for
which she has received numerous awards including a National Book Award
nomination, an NEA grant, the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Award from the
Academy of American Poets and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author
of six collections of poetry, two collections of short stories and a novel, Jane
Planet. Her most recent novel, Radiomen, was published in January 2015.
