What new author Gabriel Brownstein has done in this debut collection of short stories is take a cue from modern poets, from their fashion of alluding to classic works (however relevant or irrelevant). The Brooklyn writer has appropriated premises and titles from classic stories — F. Scott Fitzgerald"s "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," in the case of the title story — and reset the tales intimately on Manhattan"s West 89th Street.
While this may sound brilliant, it's not so much so as it is just plain inventive. The Salinger-esque works are densely populated with a multitude of odd, intelligent New Yorkers, some more intriguing than others, but far too many of them one-dimensional.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's character Wakefield (who abandons his family in order to spy on them) is in apartment 7E, being puzzled over by a kid in the same building. While nothing much of this Wakefield is revealed, we learn firsthand from the kid the experience of growing up haunted by the man"s watchful presence.
In "A Penal Colony All His Own, 11E," a young man who has suffered several nervous breakdowns, shows old friends around his apartment/museum. The "remarkable piece of apparatus," which in Kafka's story ("In the Penal Colony") is a precise machine of torture and execution, is, in 11E, an aberration in the mentally ill man"s mind.
Perhaps the best story is "Bachelor Party," one of four that do not borrow or steal from other authors. A young man, upon the demise of his older brother"s marriage, recalls attending the bachelor party and hearing a captivating, nightmarish story told by the groom. The dialogue is dead on, the plot original and the story proof that Brownstein needs no help from more famous or well-known fiction to make his own stories pop.
One final line Brownstein has drawn between his work in this book and that of classic lit: the collection totals nine stories, as did Salinger"s Nine Stories. Call it an homage.
This article appears in Nov 6-12, 2002.