Stony Parables

By Paul Gray

HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS by Joanne Greenberg

Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 194 pages; $9.95

In this collection of ten short stories, Joanne Greenberg seems eager to make things go bump in the daytime. Take the case of Aunt Bessie, a nice Jewish woman who one day stops believing in God. Watched by a cautiously admiring niece, Bessie goes on to renounce faith in banks, germs and electricity, although her unplugged television set somehow still carries whatever programs she wants to watch. Only when Bessie decides that all natural laws, including gravity, are myths does she receive her alarmingly literal comeuppance. Her niece finds her floating like a balloon about the house, being hectored and scolded by mysteriously televised rabbis. She pleads her disbelief, to no avail. "Foolish woman," a rabbi replies, "a soul goes in and out of belief a hundred times a day. Belief is too fragile to weigh a minute on. You stopped running after Him, looking for Him, struggling with Him. Even His Laws you turned from!"

Although the whimsy in this story is nicely done, Bessie's punishment strikes a censorious note that is less happily picked up throughout the book. Greenberg draws a number of characters only so that she can quarter them. A young man smuggles cocaine from Mexico into the U.S. and meets up with a malakh, a Jewish angel who subjects him to humiliating lectures: "Whenever the Lord has been convinced to widen His mercy or extend His patience it has been at the behest of a fool. You are such a fool."

In other tales, a couple trying to submerge their heritage in a Wasp suburb are threatened by an old yenta; if they do not give money to her charities, she will expose them to the smothering tolerance and curiosity of the Christian community. "On Passover," she warns, "you will be the Jew on the fellowship committee; you will explain in the schools, you will explain in the churches, you will bare your souls in the Cultural Exchange Fellowship of the Women's Auxiliaries ..." And a mother meditates caustically on the thought processes of her two teen-age children: "Instant communication, total openness, family life and sex ed. at school, and now everyone knows everything in a pop-psych, literal, pea-brained way."

A reader may agree wholeheartedly with such statements and still have an uneasy feeling. Greenberg displays little of the sympathy she expended on the mentally ill in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964) and on the deaf in In This Sign (1972). People in these stories are self-maimed, and get treated accordingly. The artistic regimen is ascetic. "Talmudic Law," one of her characters explains, "forbids the overdecorated letter, a letter for art's sake and not for the formation of legible words." Nothing is overdecorated here; Greenberg spends little time telling where her characters live or what they look like. In one story, a parent complains about a wayward son, but it is impossible to tell whether the speaker is mother or father.

What remains clearly legible throughout is Greenberg's complaint against contemporary society and what one character calls the "weekend-guest view of life." Aunt Bessie bobbing helplessly across her ceiling is a comic parable of the effects of freethinking, except that the author is not laughing. Her stony integrity often redeems these stories from irritating knuckle-rapping. They engage the mind, unsettle it and survive as disputatious reminders of first principles and last things. --Paul Gray

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