Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler.
Dial Press, 2001. $21.95 — 288 pp.

At the end of a century, in the city of New York, there lived a young man named James Branch. He was slender and quiet, with sleepy blue eyes and straight teeth, and he lived in the Preemption apartment building. James worked on Wall Street, as an accountant for Harrow East, a financial juggernaut stock company. At Harrow East and elsewhere during the day, James spoke to almost nobody. At night, though, James talked to Otis, the elevator in the Preemption. He didn’t talk to any elevator operator or any elevator passengers. He talked to the elevator itself.

The above passage, taken from David Schickler’s Kissing in Manhattan contains elements of both the best and the worst of this interesting novel.

The passage shows Schickler, a young graduate of Columbia University’s M.F.A. program, writing wonderful prose. Throughout Kissing in Manhattan Schickler maintains a verbal spell over his readers, creating through his mesmerizing prose a group of young people living in today’s Manhattan, writers, accountants and office personnel along with some strange and shady characters. Schickler’s writing has the sinewy strength of a man who knows how to put nouns and verbs together while using adjectives sparingly, the punch of a writer who believes in the power of the written word and who knows how to use that power for maximum effect. Reading Schickler is like watching a performance by a fine, skilled athlete.

Because he believes in the power of words, Schickler is able to create for us some remarkable characters. In a chapter titled “The Smoker,” for instance, which was originally a short story published in The New Yorker that helped give birth to the novel, we meet Douglas Kerchek, an English teacher, and Nicole Bonner, one of the students in his AP English class. Invited by Nicole for supper at her parents’ apartment in the Preemption, Douglas finds that the parents, in accord with Nicole’s wishes, desire to arrange a marriage between Nicole and himself. Written in this flat, abrupt sentence, such a plot for a story seems absurd, yet Schickler is able to make us believe that a young girl like Nicole might actually exist, a 19-year-old beauty who knows exactly what she wants both from life and from a husband, and who also knows what her intended husband wants. “The Smoker” is a magical fairy tale of a story that will doubtlessly appear in future anthologies.

Kissing In Manhattan is a collection of such stories that are joined into a novel by the Preemption apartment building and by a few main characters: James Branch, an accountant; Patrick Rigg, who shares an apartment with Branch, a loner haunted by demons from his childhood, who carries a revolver, and whose strange love life includes forcing women to look at themselves in a mirror until they come to love themselves; and Rally Williams, the young travel writer who becomes involved with both men.

These young people and other characters of this book — Thomas Merchant, Jeremy Jax, the Wolfs, John Castle—show us the world as a place of darkness and light, a battlefield where invisible forces of good and evil engage in locked, mortal combat. It is this ability to bring alive the unseen yet titanic forces in our lives that surely sets David Schickler off from his contemporaries.

The passage that began this review also contains what some readers may regard as a grievous fault in Schickler’s writing. Here we have a grown man, an accountant, James Branch, who often spends long hours sitting in an Otis Elevator and talking to it. Other characters are equally eccentric. Patrick Rigg, for example, is demon-ridden by the death of his brother during childhood, yet we can’t really understand, or even sympathize with Patrick’s psychological affliction. Hannah Glorybrook locks Leonard Bunce, a bitter bachelor for whom she works, naked outside her apartment; she taunts him, questions him, humiliates him, and perhaps loves him, yet never do we quite understand why she loves him.

Readers who want their stories and the characters who inhabit those stories straight up and without frills will probably want to avoid Kissing In Manhattan. Readers who enjoy speculating about the motives of characters, however, who like a little mystery in their reading, who don’t mind if every part of a story isn’t explained in full, are in for a real treat in this jewel of a novel.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)