In the Mouth: Stories & Novellas. By Eileen Pollack. New York: Four Way Books, 2008. Pp. 258. $18.95.

The six stories and novellas that make up Eileen Pollack’s new collection put the human body on full, uncensored display in ways that are rare in serious fiction. Imagine Philip Roth’s female counterpart flexing and bending all the beauties and failings of our bodies to her will and you have a glimpse of the poetic ambition that fuels In the Mouth.

In contemporary American fiction, the body and its functions often serve as little more than aesthetic decoration and its sexual component as weak means of character motivation. Like Roth, Pollack approaches the body not only on the surface, but delves into the unseen essence it harbors from birth to death. For her, the body is not simply a religious temple; it is the embodiment of soulfulness itself that no religious institution comes close to defining. Spiritual by its very nature, it tests her characters incessantly by their every instinct and impulse.

The book is a collection of endings, both psychological and physical. The opening story, “The Safe,” launches all of the themes that shape Pollack’s vision of carnal experience. Smartly rendered, this tale of a daughter coming home to assist her father as he retires is not about the contents inside a safe that has remained unopened for decades in his beloved dental office. The real safes are the daughter and her father and what they have internalized: a man whose profession centers on the repair and care of the body, and a daughter who is frightened by the presence of the divine in the body of her child. The simple story of a yard sale in which the daughter helps sell all her “parents’ belongings strewn across the lawn” ignites one of the book’s crucial questions: What are we able to release and what must we carry with us until death?

In the Mouth is partially dedicated to the memory of the author’s father, Abraham J. Pollack, DDS. The inner lives of aging Jewish men, whose identities are inextricably attached to their chosen professions, are portrayed with haunting and breathtaking authenticity. So much current fiction treads too lightly into the psychological implications of the American work ethic and its toll on the body, a condition Pollack’s elderly characters accept and their children desperately seek to avoid. Like “The Safe,” the closing novella, “Beached in Boca” dwells on Baby Boomer characters who are perfectly aware that their parents had “brought up their children to seek the very life that frightened them—not safety but risk, not a small controllable existence, but a huge volcanic life that nothing [can] contain.” These stories are reminiscent of Carl Bernstein’s overlooked memoir, Loyalties, about his own Greatest Generation parents; he recalls his mother saying, “You and your sisters go to shrinks and things, you analyze and you inspect. Your father and I prefer to do things in our lives. We’re not introspective. We’re more interested in people.” The relationship between those who care for others first and those who care only for themselves becomes one of the many irreconcilable marriages In the Mouth takes as subject matter.

Americans expend enormous mental and physical effort on their working lives. In a 1991 interview with Alvin P. Sanoff about what he learned from his own Jewish father, Roth stated, “There’s no doubt of what one learns from such a father . . . I learned from my father how to work. I learned that work is life and life is work, and work is hard . . . it’s not what our fathers said that shaped us—it’s what they did.” The beauty of Pollack’s presentation of Jewish retirees and their children is that readers are provided the opportunity not simply to know what characters do for a living but that their occupations develop them into complex human beings. Adult work becomes as precious as a child achieving an autonomous personality over decades. The child who leaves the nest requires years to comprehend just what work has meant to the parent. “The Safe,” “Milt and Moose,” and “Beached in Boca” all depict men whose occupations have been an extension of their own bodies. Work, family, and friendship are inseparable to the parents; the children come to see that those who raised them suffer from the “disease” of “thinking you have to take care of everyone.” And when there is no one to care for anymore and those children cease to need them, the parents realize that “The truth about getting old is that every single person you’ve ever loved dies.”

Pollack has been described as “an American talent” by Stephen King, who selected “The Bris” for Best American Short Stories 2007. Like King, whose strength has always been the longer short story, such as “The Man in the Black Suit,” and the novella, such as “The Body” from his fine collection Different Seasons, Pollack thrives best within the expanded canvas of the lengthier tale. Rejecting the limitations of minimalism, she opts instead for layered, rich, maximal language in “The Bris,” a story of a grown child, Marcus, coming to terms with his obligation to his dying father and pondering “all the pain one child can cause.” Although hinted at in most of her stories, here Pollack overtly explores the generational gap between parents who need the approval and acceptance of institutionalized religion, and their children who desire an inner life those institutions fail to provide them, wondering if they can ever “find a spiritual leader who [doesn’t] see his position as an opportunity to take advantage of a person in need.” “The Bris” also presents Pollack’s most accessible male characters. Marcus’s self-centeredness gives way to fragility and vulnerability. His father, in his dying days, confesses that he is not who his son and everyone else except his late wife have believed him to be. Marcus thinks he “owe[s] nothing to anyone. Except, it seem[s], his father.” Marcus discovers that his father has never been a Jew and must decide if he will grant a dying man’s last wish to be circumcised so that he may be buried in an Orthodox cemetery alongside his beloved wife. There are no easy answers to the bewildering question, “How could such an honest man have lived such a whopping lie?” With the exception of an unnecessary moment of masturbation—both actual and literary—it is a pitch-perfect story culminating in one of, if not the most, beautiful of the book’s many endings, with a son cleansing his father upon death, but more importantly cleansing an old man of everything he has hidden. All the stories in In the Mouth showcase selfish individuals relinquishing their self-interest to come to the need of others. None do so with greater tenderness than here. Marcus holds his father in his arms and steps into the sludge of a lake; he dips his father into the water, bathing him “the way a parent bathes his child.” If Roth’s moving memoir Patrimony is the nonfiction masterpiece of this genre, “The Bris” is its worthy fictional companion.

Pollack’s characters, both young and old, are aware of their sexuality, but that becomes slightly tiresome when she loses control of her content as in “Milt and Moose” and “Uno,” where the sexuality feels surface level and unnecessarily forced. “Uno” is particularly disappointing because its humorous take on political correctness is so entertaining. But nowhere is sexuality more engaging and wholly original than in “Milk,” a story written so exquisitely that each sentence becomes a kind of poetry. Pollack’s female characters all suffer by not knowing how to become adults or being unwilling to accept adulthood—equating sex with intimacy and mistaking reckless behavior for independence—and their overly intuitive introspection occasionally distracts the reader from those struggles. Yet, their perpetual state of adolescence is not unsympathetic. Much like Esther Freud in her wonderful first novel Hideous Kinky, Pollack wants us to be on the side of unsympathetic characters because even they are aware of their faults and are still trying to follow the path of virtue.

In “Milk” the fears of a new mother, Bea, nursing her child, are juxtaposed with the anxieties of a hospital roommate, Coreen, who is possibly ill-equipped for parenting. Bea’s awareness of her potential lack of maternal instinct obsesses her, and she strives to unearth that instinct from hibernation. Pollack frames “Milk” in a way that brings something entirely fresh and exciting to the familiar terrain of fiction about bringing new life into the world. Bea comes to understand that motherhood is not all joy and wonder. Likewise, Coreen realizes that each individual knows his or her own body better than any doctor or specialist, and just like the innerness of the body there is an unexplainable and inherent understanding a parent has of his or her own child. The author elevates the everyday act of a mother transferring the fluids of her body to a newborn child to a literary status beyond melodrama.

Pollack provides an acute depiction of upper middle-class life and all its complexities. While many contemporary writers seem to believe that an American-style proletariat sensibility is the most legitimate way to establish moral identity, Pollack makes no excuses for the material privileges of her characters. “Uno” is the only story in which banal class commentary creeps in, as when a wife shows irritation that her husband’s “friends [pretend] they [aren’t] rich.” The novella “Beached in Boca” is an excellent example of Pollack’s light touch. A community of affluent retirees is populated with characters that deserve a good life. Once again, a child comes to the assistance of a dying father. Like so many families, the child knows something is wrong, and the parent knows the child is aware of the existence of a problem; but the opportunity to talk about ambivalent circumstances doesn’t present itself easily. The author speaks to all children and their parents who know that there will never be a right time to address matters of life and death. She doesn’t lecture us that all of the affluence in the world can’t cure a fatal disease brought to the body by poor choices, nor does she preach the irony of a woman who embraced sexual liberation and is now astounded that “With her sexual history, her father ha[s] been the one to come down with AIDS!” The father, Milt Rothstein, from previous stories in the book, is allowed to demonstrate the more realistic feeling of anger rather than the hollow, stoic demeanor and clichéd sorrow we might expect from a less assured writer. All of Milt’s regrets and resentments are lashed out upon the one person who has come to aid him when he says to his child, “what do you understand? You, who never got close enough to anyone to feel the way I felt about your mother.” His daughter, Wendy, knows she is “tired of being strong, of having so much freedom,” knows “she’[s] reached some sort of limit” and that if one has spent her whole “life seeking strangeness, this [is] where you [end] up.” On her last day with the man who raised her, she retreats to the temporary security of emotionless sex with a new lover. Pollack’s tact is such that we forgive both Milt and Wendy, a remarkable accomplishment. Father and daughter are able to forgive each other, even if they can’t forgive themselves.

For all its brutal honesty, the collection is not without its shortcomings. Supporting characters arrive too conveniently, particularly the fling lovers in “Uno” and “Beached in Boca.” Its Northeastern-centric Jewish angle is also at times too familiar, territory that’s been mined close to exhaustion. However, Pollack trusts her reader, and more important she has an unflinching respect for her characters. She presents them objectively and allows us to reach our own conclusions. And even when the sexual details seem unnecessary, they are never trite.

The crux of this book goes deeper than a first reading might suggest. Allegra Goodman was once described as “a kinder, gentler Philip Roth.” While there is a certain appeal in urging a feminine sensibility, Pollack is, probably unconsciously, engaging one of the great dilemmas of fiction on Jewish-American themes. In recent years readers have been given stories by exceptional craftsman, such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Safran Foer, that, while powerfully presented on a narrative level, seem to rely more on the turn of the plot than on the transformation of the individual. High concepts and pop culture deconstruction can be a good romp of a read, but we are not always left with stories that appeal to our affections and intelligence. Although by no means homogeneous, Jewish fiction’s loosely collective identity, whether masculine or feminine, has always had humor as an integral component. But imagine the catastrophe if the contemporary Jewish imagination gives way completely to tasteless self-mocking. It runs the danger of becoming one monstrous in-joke nobody but the focus ethnic group can understand. The non-Jewish reader is not alienated from In the Mouth in any way. Pollack doesn’t seem to abide by the disingenuous notion so many Jewish wordsmiths adhere to: That they are not Jewish writers, just writers who happen to be Jewish. She is a Jewish writer in the best sense because she knows exactly when the ethnicity of her characters matters to their development and when not to dwell on it and simply allow the sensibility of a Jewish worldview to permeate her tales.

King writes that for Best American Short Stories 2007 he “read scores of stories that felt . . . airless, somehow, and self-serving,” stories that “felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open.” The same can be applied to much of the current crop of Jewish-American fictions. But Pollack is earning her place beside writers such as Ehud Havazelet and Frederick Reiken, who are returning fiction on Jewish themes to the emotional honesty that has always driven it forward. A character like Marcus in “The Bris” becomes all of us who have ever gone through the process of letting go of our personal histories, and must accept or at least consider that, “Maybe that [is] the source of the resentment in so many families. The parents [stew] about how much they ha[ve] sacrificed for their kids while the children [chafe] at being saddled with all the guilt.”

King says he looks “for stories that care about [his] feelings as well as [his] intellect.” Pollack’s ability to emotionally involve her reader, even when the situations are terribly uncomfortable, provides In the Mouth with staying power. Instead of relying on gimmicks to render these stories timely, she takes us back to the universal emotional qualities that make literature timeless. As the author puts it, “the body is a text,” and she utilizes its recurring grace as well as its limitations as an avenue to return us to that great literary center: the merging and collision of life’s blessings and consequences.