Fish

by Monroe Engel

Harry Karp is "Fish" - cautious divorcé, deferential lover, meticulous observer, the narrator of a wry contemporary romance. Lassitude frustrates and has once nearly killed him. So Fish fastens deliberately onto the "dependable portions of a generally elusive world," making the squares of Cambridge vivid with particulars and his place on the New England coast acute with sensation. But what truly rouses him from his "vagueing" is his girlfriend Gretta - substantial, quizzical, alarmingly unpredictable - and her ailing son Michael. Together, inadvertently, they bring Fish to the surface, where commitment feels better than observation, where love can finally be acknowledged.

217 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Monroe Engel was a member of the class of 1942 at Harvard College and won the Bowdoin Prize for his undergraduate thesis on Gerard Manley Hopkins. He enlisted in the US Army just after graduation. He was a captain and served in the Signal Corps, where he was responsible for ship to shore communications during the Normandy invasion and ended up in Pilsen on VE Day. After the war, he worked in publishing in New York, initially for Reynal and Hitchcock and then for Viking Press where he was the youngest editor. Monroe then went to graduate school at Princeton and subsequently taught literature and creative writing at Harvard for more than thirty years. During his tenure at Harvard, he chaired the creative writing program and mentored countless students, including many now prominent journalists, novelists and poets. He published five books, including four novels and a critical book on Charles Dickens.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harry "Fish" Karp, age 42, is a sometime college English instructor, sometime reports editor at a company called Municipal Systems. Divorced, living in Cambridge, Mass., he develops an interest in also divorced Gretta London, who has a 12-year old son Michael with a serious unnamed metabolic disorder. Gretta lives with her brother Alf, a condition imposed on her by her ex-husband in exchange for not interfering with custody of Michael, and doesn't seem to work. Much of the novel involves Fish attempting to spend time with Gretta, who sometimes disappears without notice. (There's no reason she should be giving notice, but Gretta is weirdly infantilized by the other characters.)

Engel uses present tense, fairly radical for the era. (He occasionally drifts into past tense when relating events from the past.) This almost always hampers storytelling. Fish was published in 1981, ressiued by Phoenix Fiction in 1985, and was lost to the mists of time. Not even Saul Bellow's blurb, "Human and charming," could save it.

Human perhaps, charming might be a stretch. I found Engel's writing fairly Jamesian and oblique. Sentences like "This description of her situtation which I'd elicited, elicted in turn a recogition that may cause me to look as impelled now as I feel," and "The airplane though had gotten the day off to a bad start by rekindling my instinct of trouble without nourishing it" need to be read twice. But there are occasional winners, like "The foot or so that separates her face from mine now is exactly the wrong distance, but we're locked into it." Vocabulary like integument and prognathous reassures us that big words still exist and some authors are going to use them.

Engel shows an interest in female body parts that go neglected by other authors, like tendons and backs of legs. Watching Alf's girlfriend Mona, Fish has "a touch of compassionate lust roused by the exposed backs of her thighs. She'd climbed the stairs like a kid, knees thrusting sideways and feet hanging loose, making the pompons wobble on the backs of her ankles."

Around a busybody friend, Christine, "I'd watched the smooth, pink soles of her feet lifting through the pile of the carpet ahead of me as she showed me into the apartment, and even the skin over her Achilles' tendons was pink, as unblemished as if she'd never worn shoes. I'd observed this with particular attention, for I suspect there's something significant about the striking differences in structure and wear in this prominent thin-skinned cord - something that could in time allow me to make a judgment about women no less comprehensive, precise, or startling than the judgment I'd come on once in one of the minor journals of my beloved Stendhal, that the women of Angoulême have the finest eyebrows in France. Could, that is, if I did my research as Stendhal did his, which I don't. Christine's Achilles' tendons though are pristine, dropping without a fault in either texture or line from plump calves to pink, uncallused heels."

I wasn't sure what to make of the one instance of nigger, which I always make note of in novels. "Well, Mona," Gretta says, "that's the first time I ever heard you talk pure nigger." Mona has just used the word toothsome which she translates as good enough to eat.

"Following Dolly down the hill again, I decide that they're probably all right still even though Les looks shorter to me as well as thinner than the last time I saw him and Dolly, from the rear, is as broad as a mare. It's hard to see how a system by which one wanes as they other waxes can operate indefinitely, but so far at least they've both retained swagger, and this similarity within difference seems to make for some kind of equity." (p. 91)

"Most of the furniture had been bought with the house, including some good antiques and a lot of heavily upholstered couches and chairs with good linen slipcovers. It was a congenial enough setting, but I couldn't imagine what it was a setting for - what my father and Sophie did there, how they used up their time." (p. 103)