Accolades/Reviews
Text Box: Praise for John J. Clayton — October 10, 2007, The Forward, by Joshua Cohen, literary critic Wrestling With Angels: New and Collected Stories By John J. Clayton The Toby Press, 616 pages Kuperman’s Fire By John J. Clayton The Permanent Press, 304 pages The Forward offers an in-depth review of John Clayton, a commentary that underscores the significance of his books and distinguishes John as an important Jewish writer. Reviewer, Joshua Cohen, compares Clayton with Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth —  high honor and rightfully deserved. Full text of Joshua Cohen’s review: http:www.forward.com/articles/11771. Below, brief excerpt: Born in New York in 1935, novelist and storywriter John J. Clayton (his family name formerly Cohon) seems the perfect elder rabbi for these prodigals. He is American Jewish literature’s great baal teshuvah: a Hebrew term that characterizes a revolutionary or counterrevolutionary reversion to Olde Time Religion but translates, literally and literarily, as “a master of repentance.” Throughout his work (myriad stories, three novels), Clayton’s middle-class American Jewish characters reveal themselves as us: as Jews concerned with the genocides of others; as Jews concerned with the processes by which we might sustain kosher life; as Jews suspicious of institutional loyalty at the expense of inspiration or “soul”— and so, as Jews who have become involved with protesting the murder in Darfur; as Jews who have become involved with environmentalism and with vegetarianism; and as Jews who have lately forsaken exclusive affiliations with Conservative or Reform Judaism, allowing Hasidim to grow from a minor Russian cult into a dominant mode of American Jewish life, the primary venue for those of us seeking our spirituality just a little more bearded. “I hope for Jewish and non-Jewish readers; but I speak as a Jew,” Clayton writes in his own introduction to “Wrestling With Angels: New and Collected Stories,” a compendium of more than 30 stories from throughout his career. Ultimately, such a summation has to shock; midcentury assimilationists must be awed in response — among them Clayton’s colleagues Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud (“May their memories be for a blessing”) and the still-living, still-writing Philip Roth — if they’re not themselves shuckling disappointedly in their graves.

This generous story volume appears a summer after the release of the author’s guileless third novel, “Kuperman’s Fire.” If 2007 is very much a retrospective year for Clayton himself, then what its two publishing seasons have given us, in these two books, is nothing less than a strange retrospective-in-advance — of what it might mean to be artistically Born Again into the oldest of Covenants.

 

 We begin with the stories, the majority being culled from three books, two of which have previously appeared: “Bodies of the Rich” (1984) was a tense and tenebrous debut, its author concerned with sex, relationships, altered mind-states and alternative politics; “Radiance” followed (1998), and the diction became lightly conventional, though the heart sadder, theologically expansive; finally, “Wrestling With Angels” a wholly new collection, crowns at volume’s end. Its tone is, without doubt, majestic, if also religiously pathetic. The story “Cambridge Is Sinking!” is Clayton’s best (written in 1972, it went unpublished in book form for a decade), and it gives you an idea of what its author was smoking early on.

 

By the time Clayton’s next collection came along, more than a decade later, those who’d burn out had already burnt out, the smoke had cleared, and a new transcendence was in the air, that titular “Radiance” — not a spirit of pushing boundaries, but of erecting them, or of learning to live with them.

 

Soon Clayton stopped innovating formally and began writing, instead, homiletic and pious prose that would alternate between insight and pedantic embarrassment: “The rabbis are said to have built a fence around the Torah, the ten thousand distinctions — koshering your kitchen, standing up to honor the Torah -- that can preserve holiness, be bridges to holiness. But they can also be debased into marks of a club, a club that separates us from each other and from God.”

 

Whichever separation — whether it’s a personal separation of the sacred within from the secular without, or a public separation of the faithful minyans from the Godless minions -- Clayton, throughout the 1980s and ’90s, separated himself: He became a writer of what has to be called, despite its universal skill, “community fiction.” While readership for Yiddish literature was, after the Holocaust, understandably small, and lessening daily, Yiddish’s greatest authors didn’t do anything, and understandably didn’t want to do anything, to make it any smaller. But Clayton, writing in English, knowingly limits his readership, has the freedom to limit his readership — and seems to think that, emulating God, in limitation is to be found great purity of idea, or expression. This obsession with purity comes through most clearly in “Kuperman’s Fire,” a novel that begins as a story of spirituality’s late or Last Days resurgence and ends as an inspirational thriller.

 

According to Clayton-cum-Cohon-cum-Cooper-cum-Kuperman, the legacy of all Jewish suffering is the directive to do right at all costs. Being spiritual means, today, “being Brooklyn.” It is impossible that such a mass return to religion or race identity could mean anything more than sentiment, or nostalgia. Individuals, however, are communities of one, are religions of one, and writers were once the great individuals. In their aimlessness that might read as mystical promise, Clayton’s earliest stories seem holier than what would come: It’s perhaps because they never mention God that they seem suffused with Him, or Her, or Nothing.

     — Joshua Cohen is a literary critic for The Forward  (October 10, 2007)

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