from The New York Times Book Review, December 20, 1998

Michelle Herman's trio of novellas features artists or academics trying to arrive at the truest direction in which to take their lives. The heroine of the bittersweet, somewhat schematic "Auslander" is a translator who is introduced to a brilliant Romanian poet, only to be pulled into a self-destructive tragedy involving the mysterious author and her deliberately unpublished work. Herman's strongest work occurs in the title novella, in which a composer and a poet discover true love at an artists' colony. Watching them struggle to understand and manage the bond that grows between them is an unexpectedly moving experience. In addition, Herman's use of her love story's setting (drawing particularly on the strained friendliness between artists who are also competitors) is shrewd and amusing. In her less successful final selection, "Hope Among Men," she cuts loose with some humorous and teasing post-modern effects, only to wind up steering dangerously close to cuteness.    --Patrick Giles

from Publishers Weekly, June 1, 1998

The novella can be a difficult form, straddling the immediacy of the short story and the more luxurious pace of the novel, but Herman balances these needs with aplomb in this collection of three long stories. Filled with warm, eccentric characters, each novella explores the difficulties faced by an assortment of individuals intellectually rich but emotionally uncertain. In "Auslander," the title character is a reclusive literary translator who confronts the brilliance of a poet who refuses to allow her work into public view. As Auslander is reluctantly drawn into the lives of the poet and her husband, both Romanian immigrants, the story moves steadily toward a tragedy that feels both inescapable and completely earned. In "Hope Among Men," a woman is jolted from her marginal existence by two men who leave her in rapid succession. This heartbreak is predicted early by the story's narrator, a gambit that serves to engage the reader more fully as the story unfolds. Balancing these tales is the title novella, the book's longest piece, a journey into the emotionally stunted life of Gad, a composer taking a working vacation at an artists' colony. Though married, Gad begins an intimate, liberating friendship with Hannah, a poet also working at the colony. Unwilling to rush her characters, Herman explores the full length of this friendship, slowly guiding the story toward a bright, charged conclusion. Herman (Missing) writes with vivid details, but much of this book's distinctiveness derives from her sense of pace. She writes past the point where many writers stop, trusting her characters to deliver aspects of themselves previously undetected.

from The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, May 10, 1998

A New and Glorious Life is a collection of three novellas by Michelle Herman, and it's clearly the work of a resourceful and sophisticated writer.
     Herman, who teaches at Ohio State University and is the author of the novel "Missing," pokes and prods her characters with unusual insight and sympathy. The collection's opening novella, "Auslander," concerns a translator of poetry, a woman in her 30s, who though fluent in nine languages, is woefully tongue-tied when it comes to matters of the heart. Referring to the woman only by her last name (Auslander), Herman establishes her protagonist's distance from the world and gives an interesting continental flourish to a story that first appeared in Twenty Under Thirty.
     When Auslander is asked by a Romanian to translate his wife's poetry, his request turns out to be far more complicated than it first appears, presenting the cool, skeptical Auslander with an unexpected opportunity to extract herself from her own lonely existence. But Auslander's defenses are too well-tended, and she is finally incapable of reaching out. Things end badly, and we are left with the impression that Auslander, true to her name, will remain an outsider for life.
     Far more cheerful, the title novella takes place in an artists' colony where an unhappily married composer, Gad, meets and falls in love with a lovely young poet, Hannah.
     Set against the amusing political bickering of the residents of the colony, and peppered with Gad's reflections on the domestic bickering that characterizes his marriage, this novella assumes a touching richness when Gad finally, at 40, decides to begin his "real life." If "A New and Glorious Life" occasionally seems a trifle repetitive and too long, it is nevertheless a pleasure from start to finish.
     Herman's third novella, "Hope Among Men," is a cleverly written tale about a painter named Hope and her rocky romances with two men referred to only as "Misery" and "Heartache." It's refreshing to read a story where the main character, Hope, ironically announces her nervous breakdown in one sentence and then goes about her business. Like Gad in the previous novella, Hope is frequently beset by guilt and shame, but she, too, manages to grow out of it.
     "Hope Among Men" also presents a nice little turn on the faith readers place in narrators, and, in fact, Herman's authorial intrusions and digressionary jaunts in this work winningly rescue its standard bad-love-affair-scenarios from the commonplace.
     In Michelle Herman we find a distinctive stylist who also possesses a spirited intelligence and a wonderfully screwy sense of humor. That combination makes for some rare and unbeatable reading in A New and Glorious Life.  --Alicia Metcalf Miller

from Our Town (New York City), September 1998

Don't be put off by the title of Michelle Herman's new fiction -- the characters in these three novellas are, like the rest of us, still yearning for that new and glorious life. Artists and intellectuals, they daydream over half-written manuscripts in tiny Village apartments or stare wistfully out the windows of Midwestern houses wishing they were back in New York. They are the children and grandchildren of immigrants (like 87-year-old Rivke in Herman's first novel, "Missing") and not quite rooted, even in New York. Their truest homes are their imaginations. It is here, through words (spoken or written), that they fall in love. Less often than most, perilously, they connect "somehow -- on the floor, in the narrow channel in between the couch and all the rows of boxes" or on "the small field the faded, many-colored oval made between the bench's legs . . . and the sharp metal multi-jointed legs that led up to the cot."
    In the first story, "Auslander," we meet a woman who believes that her "best trait" is that she knows her limits and thus cannot be disappointed. A brilliant translator of poetry in nine languages (but, signifigantly, not a poet herself), Auslander is an auslander, a foreigner, in the world of feelings. Our first glimpse is of her rushing stark naked to answer the phone (from her bathtub in the kitchen), and the real nature of her limits is hinted at in her lack of embarrassment when a man in the next building stares across at her. She has recently broken up with a poet, Farrell, and although "she was fonder of him than she had been of anyone in years -- perhaps ever in her life," she is surprised when she finds that she misses him. Her refusal to acknowledge  her own vulnerability casts its darkest shadow on a Romanian couple. She is deeply moved by the poetry of Teodora Viorescu, but totally unable to grasp the reality of her suffering, a failure that has tragic consequences that will haunt you long after you've loaned the book to a friend.
    Like Auslander, Gad, the seeker in and of "A New and Glorious Life," is ill at ease in the world of feelings. A composer (number 28 on the Times list of 33 under 40), he has at last escaped his unloved and unloving wife of 18 years and his uneasy life in a Midwestern university town for six weeks in a prestigious artists colony. Predictably, he brings his talent for alienating others with him, and when the story opens, he is examining his gregarious fellow colonists with disdain and only a trace of envy and is looking forward to the arrival of a new colonist, Hannah Sampas, whom he dreams of as his alter ego. Hannah, a pretty poet from New York, turns out to be remarkably similar to his imaginings, and they become best friends, sharing every scrap of memory and every new composition or poem. The only discordant note is struck after they sleep together for the first time, abandoning their verbal Garden of Eden. Hannah, who is engaged to a man she respects but doesn't love, is overwhelmed with guilt and sorrow, and Gad, a veteran of many love affairs, is surprised to find himself watching her with neither sympathy nor love (like Auslander, who was amazed to see Farrell "bellowing like an animal" when he discovered she'd been unfaithful to him). What bothers Gad most is that this is the first thing he won't be able to talk to Hannah about. But what bothers the reader is, is it the last?
    In the third novella, "Hope Among Men," Hope falls in love with intellectuals like Auslander and Farrell -- two accomplished men called, appropriately, Misery and Heartache -- but happily for the reader, she is not one of them. In a spoof of the cliches of contemporary fiction writing -- which Herman, a graduate of the Iowa Workshop, who teaches creative writing at Ohio State, knows all too well -- the narrator warns us at the outset that this is "not a love story." But warned as I was, I found myself rooting for Hope, a painter of very small pictures, who at the story's opening finds herself still living in the apartment she took when she began graduate school -- "a perfect square . . . above a Chinese takeout in the East Village" and still longing, after having slept with 22 men, for a good relationship. Hope manages to leave New York, but she remains "on congenial terms with Misery and Heartache," those dogged companions and, like the rest of us, she struggles to make her accomodation with them.
    Herman is a generous writer, and her prose is so clean that you only appreciate its artfulness later -- in the shower or on line at Gristedes -- when you find yourself wondering for the umpteenth time about Auslander's terrifying final deed and how Gad and Hannah are getting on these days. Of course, as the narrator of "Hope Among Men" reminds us, "Why should you believe a word I say, when you don't even know me?"  --Carol Parikh
 

from American Literary Review, fall 1999

Michelle Herman's collection of three novellas in a single volume, A New
and Glorious Life, is early and consistently concerned with time and
relationship--or with what time may make of us all, and all of us are
defined (in this universe) in terms of whom and what we relate to. Her
characters flounder in and out of love like clumsy pups, and like pups they
are ruefully endearing. The first novella in the sequence, "Auslander,"
begins with a phone call. The husband of a Roumanian poet calls the title
character, a translator, with what the translator regards as an improper
request. It is more significant than it seems that she takes this call in a
moment of celebrated vulnerability, as she is climbing into her tub. The
awkwardness that Auslander feels is, as Herman describes it, palpable. The
poet's husband proposes an artistic and/or professional awkwardness little
shy of public nudity, though not at all sexual. The poet's husband wants
Auslander to translate his wife's work--but his wife wants no such thing,
is in fact bitterly opposed to any public airing at all of her work--least
of all in translation. We inhabit, with Auslander, an ethical outland--a
country far south of all reason.
        What appears at first a timorous hesitance in Herman's prose can be
read instead as the awareness of just such contingencies. This is Baby
Boomer prose, telling Boomer stories--hypereducated people obsessed with
their relationships--an assertion less critical than it appears, just as
that much-maligned generation is stronger and better--and weaker and
worse--than it is often characterized. The great middle ground is the
middle, you know, because more of us stand there than on either edge--and
Herman takes such middling people and paces them out to some far rim of
emotional endurance, where they must build a fire, or perish. It isn't
hesitance at all--it's fear; and in situations as charged as those in these
stories, it's justified. Herman's frontiers are interior--but they are
still perilous.
    Ultimately enamored of the Roumanian woman's work, yet knowing she
has no right to anything without the poet's consent, Auslander struggles with
one such moral dilemma. The dilemma is enacted at the joint between life and
art--a juncture that proves identical to that between death and life. In
the end, none of it is as she thought it would be--her own sense of right
and wrong, the value and meaning of art, the relationship between wife and
husband. In or out of fiction, after all, so few things are what they
seem--and Herman's plots resolve themselves in a series of moral and
emotional transactions--exterior gains and losses not so much of stature or
position as of succor and support. Her characters cannot abide without
others of their kind, and this makes of them very believable characters.
The economies which arise from Herman's stories are like other economies
in that what is lost can and must ultimately be balanced with what is
gained--denouements that remain nevertheless provisional. Hope is in the
struggle against decay and in the need to care. The preservation of things
humanly precious is an overarching concern of all three novellas.
        But it isn't that simple, either: the end of "Auslander" seems
actually to contradict this. Other concerns underlie what appears at first
a form of metafiction--unquestionably so in one case--"Hope Among Men"--
and arguably also in "Auslander" and "A New and Glorious Life." Questions
here are more important than answers since answers are not only fluid, but
actually contingent on the terms of the questions--what are the borders
between us? What are the limits of action, possibility, influence? Other
questions in the Herman universe might include these: how far do you go
with a person? When is it time to quit? What justifies betrayal, and when
is it not betrayal, but simply moving on? The second novella gives the
volume its name. "A New and Glorious Life," read casually, gives the
impression of a pedestrian and utterly routine love triangle; yet in it,
there are actually two such triangles, and while we are never given much
of a chance to dislike or like the conventionally "wronged" parties, we are
also never quite sure that the couple moving inexorably toward consummation
isn't more than a little hypocritical--or self-deceiving--or at best just a
little dense.
    It gets still more complex. The two characters clearly deceive themselves
about a relationship--but which relationship? Is it Gad, the protagonist,
who deceives himself about his wife, Janet? Or Hannah, the new object of
his regard, whom he meets at an artist's colony, deceiving herself about
her lawyer-betrothed, St. John? As Gad and Hannah edge nearer and nearer
to the inevitable physical consummation of their own relationship, the winter
New England landscape of the artist's colony transforms into spring--a real
New England spring, muddy and inconvenient and difficult to traverse. The
question that hovers over the story at that juncture is this: when will
Hannah and Gad make love? He calls her "beautiful"; she speaks of his
"generosity of spirit," and they study one another, touch one another,
without ever going quite too far, and the New England landscape transforms
wetly from winter into spring. They tell one another all the stories they
have, and tell them with that "inexplicable intensity" associated "with the
telling of a dream the morning after."
        Their solitude, as they transform from friends into lovers,
anticipates on several levels "Hope Among Men," the final novella in this
slender volume. The title puns unsubtly on the name of the protagonist,
Hope, an art conservator, whose story is that of the sequential
relationships she has with two men. The only names we ever know them
by are Misery and Heartache, and again Herman deceives us with what at
first blush appears an over-allegorized lament on the perfidy of males. It is
not that; but it is very much part-and-parcel with the other two novellas, and 
the collective result is one of those mysteriously unified volumes of short
fiction recalling Louise Erdrich or Raymond Carver. "Hope Among Men" is
the most conscious metafiction--and that it is, points up also the
metafictional agenda underlying the other two.
        Demetrius Gadol--Gad--is a moderately successful composer. At the
beginning of "A New and Glorious Life," he has begun a six-week stay at a
New England artist's colony. He is married to Janet, and the marriage is
not a happy one. He has, we are informed, practiced a rather strained
sexual fidelity for the last two years. That and his presentation to her of
his colony trip as a fait accompli are sufficient reason for Janet to let
him loose. But she doesn't let him that loose, for Gad is haunted by the
"grim and unforgiving specter of his wife." We are led to believe that the
relationship is notably unpleasant for Gad and Janet both. "Can you
recall," Janet asks, "--I can't--the last time you were even remotely
pleasant to me?" She knows that Gad has been faithful to her, because she
also knows that he has not troubled to be considerate of her. Gad is not
entirely likable--no one in this story is, excepting Hannah, who comes off
as a fortysomething sort of flower child. Which raises an interesting
question.
        Because the same thing is true of "Hope Among Men"--no one in
that novella is entirely likable, either--except Hope. Hope is loyal,
sacrificing--all the good stuff. For instance, Hope moves to a new job in a
Midwestern city. At her invitation, and after she has found him a job
there, Misery follows. After they have unloaded all his stuff--and also
after they have had sex--he surprises her, with the news that he has fallen
in love--with someone he has now left behind in New York. At novella's end,
Hope is writing to him; he is still in the Midwestern city, safely isolated
from present and former loves. She tells him, in her letter, that she has
become "a little bit obsessed" with the notion that some artists "want what
they have made to fall apart." Misery responds that he thinks most artists
want their work to "last eternally"--but qualifies this by noting that "you
can't know they will . . . It's the uncertainty that interests me. I wonder
if it--the uncertainty--wouldnít have some effect on your 'process' (as
they say). Are you consciously aware, as you work on a painting, that it
may fall into ruin over time despite all your best efforts?" The
implication is that the suspense gives rise to value--and thus the
emotional square dance that leaves this triangle (yet another one) hung in
perpetual, mid-continent space. Hope, who struggles against decay to
preserve art for the future, discusses Albert Pinkham Ryder, a painter "who
seemed not to care what happened to his paintings." Thinking too much about
love is like too many cooks--and the art in all art is in the practice, not
the preservation.
        So what is it that counts? For Gad, it is the dawning realization
that his feelings for Hannah are different from those of the casual affairs
already foresworn--these the "jumble of memories . . . shaken loose by his
and Hannah's first embrace," which could not accommodate the wider and
deeper scope of his new feelings. His behavior is also different; he
forswears speaking of Hannah to acquaintances back home--acquaintances
he shares with Janet--where he had not only spoken, but implicitly gossiped
at length regarding earlier, more fleeting attachments.
        It is the serious and inescapable undertow of time itself that saves all
this from preciousness--the parallel between life and art made explicit by
Misery and Hope, in the novella that needed it most. That Gad and Hannah
encounter one another in a place and atmosphere supposedly
designed to make their work go well--and for both of them, the work does
go well--is another example of this. All of these characters are finally like
Gad, who is "a misfit. That was what it really came down to: to misfitting,
and being chronically misunderstood." The place they meet is the place they
work, and their work becomes the metaphor of relationship, and the work of
the narrator the telling of the story, and behind it all (as with any metafiction)
what we may take to be the "real" voice of a "real" writer named Michelle
Herman, whose concern is the space of her own art: the
telling of tales, like this one and the other two. Likewise, Hope meets
Misery and Heartache at school, and Auslander faces her moral dilemma in
the context of the preservation of an art we are told is sublime. And all
run afoul of the tricky terrain of love, never seeming quite to close the
gap--excepting possibly Gad and Hannah, in the hopeful but inconclusive
end.
        So on one level, it all goes back to that muddy New England
landscape and the messiness with which it is enmeshed. There is nothing in
the human condition as neat, precise, or clean as we would have it be. The
complicity of Hope in her own successive victimizations is a case-in-point.
At novella's end, after the scene where they discuss via letter the
artist's complicity with decay, she comforts visiting Misery, who makes
"gloomy jokes about his unemployability," while Hope says "serious and
cheerful things, insisting that he'll find something that's worthy of him
if he just keeps looking. She feels now, as she often does when she is with
him, that it is her job to give him reasons to be optimistic"--and of
course, "reasons to be optimistic" are reasons for hope, or for Hope. The
relationships in Herman's stories, in other words, actually mirror those of
her metafiction, until we wonder who is telling whom the tale; who is
encouraging whom; who is buying and who selling the bill of goods. Such
landscapes--of moral or otherwise transactional ambivalences--are always
muddy going, but hope springs eternal.
    The writing itself reflects some of this agenda--especially in the title
novella, which provides the meat in the sandwich anyway. Herman's
exposition is often as tangled as the emotional landscapes of her
characters--the objective correlative of all that New England mud--and
we do not bog in them so much as we feel the drag of the histories they
reflect: those of Gad, and of Hope--and of Auslander's dour Roumanian
poet, whom we never really even know. The writing reflects all this, and it is
occasionally tough but also rewarding going, never quite descending to the
utter unintelligibility that has seemed permissible and even desirable
since Joyce and Faulkner. It is, in other words, complex enough to engage
the professional, while lucid enough to remain accessible to the general
reader. There ought to be more writing like it--it remains sadly rare. A
seeming bog of exposition yields an astonishing poetic flower.
        Herman's multilayered efforts here--artichokes with something
better than thin air at the core--speak to the emotion that most discomfits
us all, that is also the one most essential: love, of course. Not mother's
love, nor love of country, nor love of friends, nor brotherly love--no
agape at this sitting--but Eros unchastened and unashamed, the validating
love of a life partner who is also a sex partner, who knows all the
wrinkles and warts, physical and otherwise, but elects to love you anyway.
That is how Gad and Hannah begin "their real lives . . . Their real life,
together. A new and glorious life."   --Kevin Clay
 

A New and Glorious Life