Post Xanax, Hecht transcends Nazis, tomatoes

By Chris Schmidt

Like Tennessee Williams' Sebastian, who famously wrote just one poem each summer, Julie Hecht's slight and satiric short stories have been appearing in The New Yorker almost annually since 1989 with an equally subversive, desultory air. Yet the publication of her debut short story collection Do the Windows Open?--all nine have appeared previously in the pages ofThe New Yorker--makes the quiet Hecht appear even more mysterious. Who writes only nine stories in seven years, each one narrated by the same disaffected, quasi-autobiographical East Hampton housewife? What literary unknown has every one of those stories accepted by The New Yorker--to judge, at least, from the seamlessness of narrative in the book? Though I'd read all the stories before, I awaited the book release with a quiver of anticipation, if only to see a picture of the elusive writer. But alas, no picture, and the jacket blurb only furthers the enigma: "Julie Hecht was born in Manhattan; lives in East Hampton in the winter and Massachusetts in the summer. She has been writing stories since she was eight years old."

The description is suspiciously close to that of the narrator herself, who relates these digressive tales as if writing a letter to a fellow macrobiotic friend (having been offered a piece of carrot cake, the narrator declines: "I can't. My stomach is sticking out...Too many tomatoes. Too yin and watery.") The character who narrates these stories, if it's not already evident, is a spot-on parody of a certain type of lady who lunches. In this case, however, the boredom is taken one step beyond, to a purgatorial world-weariness. Hecht's narrator is a lady who literally doesn't lunch--doesn't wear anything but linen and cotton, doesn't, in fact, do much of anything, except take photographs of the world-famous reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto and share techniques for removal of the dreaded polo-player from a certain designer's clothing. (With disapproval, she explains, "Then Ralph learned the thing he so yearned to be, learned it and copied the whole thing and put it all together...and then ruined the shirts, with the polo player embroidered right on the chest.") This is New Yorker mock-ingenuous at its finest. Label Hecht's project what you will--"Letters from Nantucket," "Department of Dysfunction," "Annals of Anhedonia"--I'm convinced some New Yorker editor is having a high ol' time describing Tina Brown's summer in the Hamptons, writing under pen name so as not to be found out and canned, like so many Ved Mehtas.

Anhedonia, Woody Allen fans will know, was the subtitle to Annie Hall, and despite the obvious differences in social class, Hecht's narrator and Allen share a distinctly Jewish tendency towards paranoia. Like Allen, who once thought he heard an anti-Semitic slur in the question "Did you eat?" ("Did you hear that," he said, `D'Jew eat?'), she knows a Nazi's "ice-blue eyeballs" when she sees them, in this case, in her optometrist: "Kropstadt said, `I haf to send them to Germany.' Imagine my horror... I was surprised, because when I had first entered the store and looked at him face-to-face, his face seemed thin, and I had to resist the urge to say, `You seem thinner!' Weight loss didn't seem to be the right topic to discuss with someone who might have once been in the starvation business."

This is deliciously absurd, and to some degree, Hecht's narrator knows it. She's bored, but has the overactive imagination of a writer, always observing more than is plausible, or even possible. Though her insights are shockingly on the mark ("When I checked to see which kind of Pepperidge Farm cookie such a man would choose, I was surprised to see that it was Chessman. In my long acquaintance with this brand of cookie I had never seen anyone buy or eat Chessmen."), they obviously lack the patina of poetic fever. But that's the very point: the unpretentious detail Hecht's narrator chooses to notice mocks the kind of detail a "real" writer would pad her story with. When the narrator vilifies Gary Hart, not on the basis of his extramarital affair, but on a duplicitous comb-over ("He dared to mention John F. Kennedy as his hero and mentor, but just compare the two heads of hair."), then goes on to point out Yassir Arafat's many nose jobs ("[I]t's the first thing you notice, other than his filthy turban and perpetual three-day growth of beard."), the overstatement is rich, and yet, rings true. Hecht satirizes the sort of things a media-saturated culture really does notice. At the same time, she elbows the writer in us, whispering: who notices the Calla lilies these days, anyway?

Blissfully unpretentious, these are stories for the reader who would like to escape the canon, or at least make fun of it. (After spotting Kropstadt through his workroom window, the narrator exclaims, "I scurried off in a Kafka-like mode. Since I was wearing running sneakers, the scurrying was simplified.") Not that a life of valerian root tea (having foresworn Xanax sometime after story number two) and home renovation doesn't have its pitfalls. As the stories in Do the Windows Open? accumulate into one long narrative, one realizes why they seem so un-literary: they were modeled not so much on literature, but so as to resemble successive reports from the psychiatrist's couch.

What is compellingly unclear is who the patient is: the world--which the narrator diagnoses with bemused, often clinical detail--or the narrator, who conversely keeps the world at arm's length? Of romance, for example, she waxes: "Perhaps the brother thought I had an interest in him. If I had a romantic interest in any man, I'd never invite him to see a lane or house. I would have to ignore the man completely. Didn't the brother know how these things worked?" But of course, the narrator's dismissal masks a real desire for companionship, a vulnerability constantly elided into astringent wit. Hecht's stories are not fluff, precisely because they do stay on the surface, because they describe--to borrow the words of another woman who understands the pathos that motivates camp--the way we live now. The book's occasional lack of polish is all the more endearing, as if the narrator were not a writer in pursuit of art, but someone who merely wants an audience. Then again, maybe that's the real joke.

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