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By Laurel Corona
 SAN DIEGO--Many years ago I had an odd travel experience involving a lost shoe on a PSA flight. I don’t remember how I managed to leave a shoe behind on the plane, but I didn’t have it when I got home, so I called the airline to ask if it had been found. “It’s a black woman’s shoe, nothing fancy,” I said to the person in the lost and found office. “Oh yes,” he said, giving the flight number. “We have it right here.”
I hopped in the car and parked in front of the terminal for the minute or two it took to retrieve the brown paper bag containing the shoe. (PSA? Leaving an unattended car in the loading zone? This is really an old memory!) Tossing it in the back seat, I headed for home. When I got there, I opened the bag and discovered to my astonishment that it wasn’t my black shoe.
I still remember it. It was a size seven pump—much smaller than my feet—from a good maker. It was creased across the toes, needed a polish job, and was a bit run down at the heel, but it still had a lot of wear left in it. Who does this shoe belong to? I found myself wondering. A professional woman, with enough money to buy good shoes, but not so much she would easily toss a worn pair aside? A young courtroom lawyer still paying off law school debt? A stay-at-home mom who makes her own shoes last because her kids’ don’t? Age thirty? Sixty? White? Black?
If I hadn’t gotten quickly distracted by something else, I’m sure in an hour I could have made up someone like Carol, a middle-aged state worker, who makes frequent day trips to the main office in Sacramento. A bit sensitive about the size of her feet, she always buys shoes too small. She always brings a pair of stretched-out tennies to change into for the flight back home because she knows her feet will hurt like crazy at the end of the day. Or Amy, who has started spelling her name Aymee, who went straight to the airport from her boring job as a file clerk in a law firm. She hasn’t seen her boyfriend in a few weeks, and there’s no way she’s getting off the plane in her work clothes.
She spent half an hour in the airport changing into a sexy little skirt and clingy tee, poufing up her hair and redoing her makeup, before slipping into those new shoes that make her legs look really hot. Or Stephanie, LaTanya, Maria, Esther….
I hadn’t thought about the lone black shoe for decades, but reading Rhyming Life and Death, the new novella by the renowned Israeli writer Amos Oz, brought it to mind again. Observing something ordinary and inventing a story around it is probably one of the most common things fiction writers do when their minds wander. Why is that well-dressed woman eating a bag lunch in the park? What is the man hanging on the strap in the subway going home to? What’s making that sales clerk look so sad?
Oz’s novella is about an author doing just that. It’s the story of eight hours in the life of an Israeli writer. It opens in a diner, where the Author (he is nameless in the book) is eating a quick dinner before going to an appearance at a community center. It ends after a night spent wandering around imagining the life stories of the people he encountered that evening. These imagined stories become the plot, interwoven with Oz’ narration about the Author’s rather forlorn view of himself and his chosen profession.
Oz is at once sympathetic and cynical, spilling out what are presumably some of his own annoyances in a tumble of words. In the opening scene, while the Author waits for the waitress to take his order, he imagines the questions his audience may ask:
“Why do you write? Why do you write the way you do? […] And by the way, would you define yourself? How would you respond to those who attack you, and what do those attacks do to you? Do you write with a pen or a computer? And how much, roughly,
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do you earn from each book? […] What does your ex-wife think of the female characters in your books? And, in fact, why did you leave your first wife, and your second wife? […] And above all, how is it that, as a creative artist, you lead such a stolid, unexciting private life? Or all there all sorts of things we don’t know about you? [..] And would you please tell us, briefly and in your own words, what exactly you were trying to say in your last book?”
By the end of the evening, the waitress (whom the Author names Ricky and whose visible panty line he finds strangely erotic) has gained a rival, Lucy. Ricky once had a brief affair with Lucy’s boyfriend Charlie, the reserve goalie for the Bnei-Yehuda soccer team, who bedded both women in the same Eilat hotel. Lucy, the runner up in the Queen of the Waves beauty contest, eventually married the son of a prominent industrialist, Ovaddya Hazzam, who was famous for his blue Buick and his rather suspect Russian émigré friends, but now lies dying in a hospital room with a catheter bag that needs emptying. Ricky, Lucy, Charlie, Ovvadya, and his son are only five of the more than thirty characters the Author dreams up, moving in rapid succession from one to the next in a manner that seems strangely coherent and freely associative at the same time.
Each new story takes the reader by surprise with its immediate intimacy and its striking resonance with people we know--or perhaps the people we are. In one of the most excruciating scenes in the book, the Author imagines Ricky calling up Lucy, in the belief that they are bound together by the shared affair with Charlie. The reader gets only Ricky’s side of the phone call, as she desperately tries to get Lucy to understand why they could be the most intimate of friends (the homoerotic tones are clear), all the while begging Lucy not to misunderstand, and above all, not to hang up.
There’s a middle-aged man caring for a verbally abusive, bedridden mother who requires him to service her bedpan, and a pimply young poet whose own fantasy life revolves around the Author asking to read his poems and picking him out as a genius in the making. At other points the Author’s imagined world and the real happenings of the night become so blurred it is unclear whether he is doing a particular thing or only thinking of how it might work out if he did. A young woman has read from his work at the podium that evening, and he begins to fantasize about having sex with her. Whether he actually does isn’t clear, but the heartbreaking loneliness in each of their lives resonates equally either way.
For all the rambling nature of the plot, Rhyming Life and Death does add up. It is at once a work of fiction and a meditation about the creative process, a peek at what inspiration is and a cynical potshot at those who write even when they lack much in the way of thoughts at all. It feels like the novelistic equivalent of viewing a collection of Edward Hopper paintings or George Segal’s white plaster sculptures of ordinary people—image upon image of sadness, lack of direction, and overwhelming isolation.
Oz’ instincts as a writer are clearly evident in the length of this piece. He knows when he’s taken his construct far enough.
Because the stories the Author is weaving aren’t leading to tidy conclusions, Oz ends the novella with his own version of Leopold Bloom coming back home after a series of nocturnal adventures. If the book were three times as long, I might not have read to the end, feeling that I had gotten the picture already. As it is, this book is well worth the investment of the reader’s time not just for the poignancy of the story and Oz’s penetrating and witty take on things, but for the chance to see one of the great writers
of our time at the peak of his craft.
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