April 04, 2006

NancyKay Shapiro Recommends

I found Lore Segal's strikingly unique debut novel Her First American through the process of judging a book by its cover: the hardcover and early paperback editions were decorated with a detail from a Reginald Marsh painting of passengers in a New York City El Car. Attracted as I am to all things New York (and a fan of Marsh), I picked up the book at a library, and immediately fell head-first into the vividly disoriented and disorienting worldview of its young Viennese heroine, the WWII refugee Ilka Weissnix:

Ilka had been three months in this country when she went West and discovered her first American sitting on a stool in a bar in the desert, across from the railroad. He was a big man. He bought her a whiskey and asked her what in the name of the blessed Jehoshaphat she was doing in Cowtown, Nevada.
"Nevada?" Ilka had said. "I have believed I am being in Utah, isn't it?"

All of which makes this book sound like a chore, when in fact it's full of frequently hilarious conversations and set-pieces (the whole section at the summer cottage peopled by a seething variety of inter-racial couples is indescribably rich and strange and feels absolutely true to life) as it unfolds a tender love story of unpredictable complexity.

I've never found characters in fiction anything like Carter, Ilka, and their circle in Her First American. Ilka's alien point of view on post-war America alternates with that of Carter, down-trodden and all-too-familiar with the daily grinding oppression that sends him to the bottle. As Ilka becomes an American, and rises into a better position in life, Carter inexorably sinks. Through Ilka and Carter, Segal juxtaposes the combined struggles of two dispossessed minorities, even as she unflinchingly and mournfully illustrates their ultimate inability to really communicate with one another.

NancyKay Shapiro is a writer in New York City. Her novel, What Love Means To You People, was published by Thomas Dunne in March 2006.
(Photo by Greg Marin)

If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

About

My Events

Search

My book

In hardcover

In Morocco

In Italian

In Portuguese

In french

In dutch

In spanish