RHODA LERMAN WAS AN ORIGINAL, A WRITER OF DAZZLING IMAGINATION who never undertook the same kind of novel twice, producing comedy, satire, historical fiction, fantasy, fable, and tragicomedy in a career that went all over the place. Normal genres, normal boundaries did not exist for her. In her thinking, she was always open to the unexpected. She liked to claim descent from Hasidic mystics. She went through life with a firm grasp of practical necessity but with one ear always open to otherworldly truth. She called it thinking sideways, letting the other brain speak. “I am a woman with my feet on the ground,” she said to me once. “But I talk to creatures in outer space.” When I reported this conversation back to her, I suggested she edit “creatures in outer space” to something a little less crazy, and she thanked me for having her back, replacing the creatures in outer space with “a psychic who talks to dead dogs.” But the original statement, I now think, is the one to remember, as forcefully stating the way in which Lerman lived in two realms at the same time.
She was a thirty-seven-year-old housewife in Syracuse when her great comic novel, Call Me Ishtar, was published. In it, the Sumerian fertility goddess is imagined as inhabiting the body of a housewife in Syracuse. It opens with the husband fingering his wife to climax while they are driving across the bridge between Canada and New York, returning from a business trip. Such raunchiness was just starting to enter the American novel with Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, the latter published in the same season as Ishtar. Spirited, generous, sexy without being solemn about sex in the way of most male novelists of the time, Lerman the debut novelist was greeted ecstatically by reviewers, who tended to compare her to Roth, because of the raunchiness and because both excelled at what one critic called “the Jewish absurd,” a mixture of energy, lucidity, and hysteria. She infused suburban American life with mythic depth as Joyce had intertwined Dublin life with the wanderings of Odysseus. She was a female Joyce, a female Roth, exactly what the seventies wanted.
Had she followed Call Me Ishtar with another raucous romp or another myth-impregnated view of modern life, it would have been better for her career. Instead her next book, although equally good, was quite different. The Girl That He Marries is a sharp-focused, realistic and satiric view of the marriage game in New York City. A young woman realizes that in order to capture the man she wants, she has to turn herself into someone she doesn’t want to be. Lerman turns the usual marriage plot, in which characters grow into marriage, inside out. Jane Austen would plotz!
Following her exploration of marriage into a wholly new genre, she imagined herself next into the union of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and produced her saddest and most empathetic book, Eleanor, about a woman married to a man who holds all the cards. And after that she imagined herself—in some ways, it didn’t demand as much empathy as to imagine herself as Eleanor Roosevelt—as a woman who abandons both husband and lover and finds happiness melding her consciousness with that of a gorilla. Animal Acts is a clever, zany novel, whose author seems increasingly concerned with mythic differences between male and female, animal and human.
So she spun from one kind of novel to another, never exhausting her imagination or her need to express the multiplicity of her nature. It would be unusual for any one reader to follow her to the outer limits of her wild imagination and enjoy all the kinds of writing she produced. For me, her next novel, The Book of the Night, is difficult. It is set in the past and the future, the narrator is at times a woman, a man, and a cow, and it is filled with wordplay. But Lerman herself considered this her best novel, and I have no doubt others will too. It perfectly fulfills the notion that certain New Age intellectuals of the eighties had of the modern work of literary art: unrestricted by linear plot or synthetic “characters,” inscribing the free play of the mind. These savants, whom Lerman admired and who admired her, were based in the New-Age Mecca of Crestone, Colorado, and devoted to “the realization of a new planetary culture.” Lerman was spending a while teaching in Boulder and her openness to big ideas led her to this group.
It also motivated a period of study with a distinguished rabbi in Boulder, and that, in turn, inspired her masterpiece, God’s Ear, about a young Hasid forced to take over his father’s congregation in—of all places—the high desert of Colorado. She depicts an American West peopled by men in Eastern European beaver hats, mystics with spiritual ties to the Native Americans whose land they have bought, but hopeless schmegeggies about wilderness living. Passionate, hilarious, and heartbreaking, God’s Ear has been described rightly as having the appeal of a Chagall painting. It was, again, received with wild enthusiasm by critics but did not reach a wide audience.
Lerman continued to write although she did not publish another novel in her lifetime. To earn a living—and, I imagine, to absorb her immense energy—she and her husband Bob became breeders of champion Newfoundlands, wholly immersed in the world and the culture of dogs. She wrote two wonderful non-fiction books about dogs and, unsurprisingly, seemed to understand them in the same complex way she understood people. And yes, she did consult an “animal communicator” to talk to her dogs both alive and on the other side of the rainbow bridge.
I had had my own whacky idea: I was going to read through a shelf of fiction in the library randomly selected to see what was out there in the world of literature, unfiltered by current opinion. I chose the LEQ to LES shelf in the New York Society Library and so discovered Rhoda Lerman’s work. I felt a jolt of joy when I first read her, not just because I liked her work so much, but because I wanted there to be someone like her on my shelf: a first-rate writer who never had the success she deserved. I wanted to show how rare was literary merit and how even rarer, enduring literary fame. More than we like to admit, a life spent writing can leave behind wonderful books that occupy space on a library shelf but are never checked out.
Rhoda was not astonished when I turned up in her life and brought her work, in a modest way, back to public attention. She believed that the universe provides. “Of course,” she said, “the universe also provides cancer.” She was being treated for thyroid cancer when I met her and died of it in August 2015, typically enthusiastic even at the point of death to see what was on the other side.
It makes me very happy that The Overlook Press is re-issuing Rhoda Lerman’s work. Most are surefire delights, bound to please and exhilarate all who read them. Some will make us argue amongst ourselves. The conversation will give the books another shot at enduring, proving them to be the classics I believe they are.
—Phyllis Rose, New York