Navigate Books of the Month: Reading Lists Drawing from Life by Joel Oppenheimer Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan's America by Joe McQueenan A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency by William Bundy Half and Half: Writers on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural edited by Claudine Chiawei O'Hearn Split: a Countercultural Childhood by Lisa Michaels Previous Books of the Month: May: WOMEN June: SUMMER

A Very Good Mensch In this collection of essays Joel Oppenheimer is insightful, witty and hopeful BY CHRISTINA MELANDER cmelander@wweek.com Drawing from Life by Joel Oppenheimer Asphodel Press, 300 pages, $24.95, ISBN 1.55921.197.0   In 1973, 43-year-old Joel Oppenheimer lost his teeth--the upper half ones, anyway. This might seem like a banal incident, but in the hands of a storytelling craftsman it becomes a poignant, symbolic event, added to the successive losses of innocence, virginity, an alcohol habit, a first wife, ideals and country. Such was the subject matter of "Oppenheimer's Kvetch," a column that jumped from biweekly to weekly to monthly during its 16-year run in the Village Voice. A student at the arty Black Mountain College, Oppenheimer came into poetry with postmodern peers H.D. Stevens, Robert Duncan and the pioneering Charles Olson. His stint as a columnist began in 1969, when friends urged him to put his conversational thoughts about Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint on paper and submit them to the Voice as "Oppenheimer's Complaint." And so the poet's dead-on, wry observations on baseball, loving, fathering, the worsening state of the union, passing seasons, sickness, war games, word games, newspapers, progress, the Village and the vanishing art of conversation were extended beyond the bar and classroom. I came to know Oppenheimer in 1982 (two years before "Kvetch" was abruptly canceled as the Voice pursued a new wave of hipness), when he moved to New Hampshire to teach at New England College, where my father is a professor. A preteen preoccupied with stickers, Sweet Valley High and softball at the time, I had never read his column before I picked up this book; neither had I read much of his poetry until college, but I do remember his book Marilyn Lives! with the terrific quote "she looked as though, if you bit her, milk and honey would flow from her." My family was lucky enough to share a friendship with Oppenheimer before he died of lung cancer in 1988, but those who weren't will reap the pleasure of his personality in Drawing from Life. Though he deemed musing invaluable and regarded the chair as a vehicle to more spaces than any form of moving transportation, he was also reactionary in sincere and often humorous ways. Contemplating the running craze gearing up in 1978, he responded by rising at 5:30 am to sit on his stoop, where he read essays by Paul Goodman and remarked with a smile to sweatsuit-clad passersby, "My brain is jogging." "They all thought I was crazy," he wrote, "which made us even." The blithe pieces are countered by angry, despairing rants about Nixon, Reagan, Grenada, the Falklands, sportscasters and "the rich getting richer, the poor getting babies." All 92 selected writings (and undoubtedly the unabridged lot, too) are equal parts brilliant insight, discreet wit and earnest hope. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, Oppenheimer genuinely believed that humankind was capable of goodwill--a quality he generously exhibited.

 

originally published July 29, 1998