Columbia Spectator Interviews Bruce Jay Friedman

“When you pit two oppositional characters together, crazy things are going to happen,” Bruce Jay Friedman explains—and, oh yes, his latest compilation of short stories is chalk-full of the aforementioned dichotomy. Take “The Convert,” which pits a Catholic-turned-Jew against a Jew married to a Catholic, or “Neck and Neck,” which follows two men competing for literary fame over the span of several decades. Friedman’s book, Three Balconies (Stories and a Novella) is a terrifically fun read, and affects the same sort of wry, twisted humor found in the screenplay of Splash, Friedman’s Oscar-nominated work. The stories in question were written over the span of several years, and, for the most part, deal with the plight of professional underdogs, i.e., struggling writers, reporters and actors, and Friedman admits that this is, to some extent, an autobiographical inclination on his part: “Many of the stories are an extrapolation of an incident that I had in my life, which, if…expanded… make[s] a story,” Friedman tells me, “there were a lot of forces at work [when I was young] so that I could almost describe myself as sort of an underdog, with sympathy for the underdog; or it may be some sort of automatic connection with people who are struggling.”

When asked about his influences, Friedman replies without hesitation; his reply, however, is roundabout and I am puzzled until I realize that Friedman’s interpretation of the question diverges completely from my conception of it—as I come to realize during the interview, Friedman attaches specific episodic memories to the most basic ideas, turning every answer into something of a short story in itself. In this instance, although he eventually limits his literary influences to Thomas Wolfe, James Jones (From Here to Eternity), J.D. Salinger, and the author of the Big Blue Book of Fairytales, I am treated to a few anecdotes in the process of his explanation. Friedman first outlines his childhood experiences in the Bronx in the forties: “We weren’t a bookish family [but] I discovered the library, and I was always running back and forth…from the street to the bookish life.” Friedman describes himself as essentially “self-taught,” with the radio and people that he heard (in his family, in the street) playing a heavy hand in the development of his understanding of the way humans communicate and build relationships. Finally, Friedman touches on his stint in the Air Force in the fifties, and, surprisingly, this is still incredibly relevant to my initial question—“I had one strong influence in the Air Force,” Friedman details, “My commanding officer was a literary guy, and had me read three books in one weekend…at age 21, I decided it would be nice to be a writer.”

Friedman continues on in this autobiographical vein, telling me about the generation of one of the more popular stories in Three Balconies, “The Investigative Journalist,” which approaches the subject of incarceration with a surprisingly envious attitude: “It stemmed from [my experience working] on the movie Stir Crazy—as part of the research, I visited a prison in Huntsville, Texas, and noticed it was very clean and peaceful. At the time, I was living alone, in the middle of a divorce, so I felt a sort of camaraderie in the prison; [I thought,] What if a fellow like me fell in love with a prison and arranged to get arrested?”

I decide to end by asking Friedman pointedly about the way the inner flap of his latest book describes it as a set of “moral fables”—surely, I think, Friedman will self-effacingly scoff at this grandiose and seemingly irrelevant terminology. But, instead, Friedman replies mysteriously, “Fables? Yeah, the word comes up.” And the truth is, his short stories do have a “tilted” moral quality to them, albeit one that concerns itself less with small Aesop-inspired animals than with contemporary human issues like sex, friendship, and modern religion.

An April Fool's Harbourfront, with Bruce Jay Friedman

For all Toronto-area Biblioasis-o-philes: Bruce Jay Friedman will be at Harbourfront this Wednesday, reading alongside Robert Carr and George Elliott Clarke. I'll be in Toronto for this, as I have to head into town for a couple of meetings. I'm quite excited about it: I've not yet had the pleasure of meeting Bruce. An Academy Award nominated screenwriter, Bruce is the godfather of Black Humour; a wonderful storyteller and anecdotalist, it's certain to be an excellent evening.

For those interested in attending, the evening will start at 7:30 in the Brigantine Room, at the Harbourfront Centre (235 Queens Quay West). I'll try to take pictures, and post them on my return.

Boston Globe review of Bruce Jay Friedman's Three Balconies

by Dan Wakefield

Bruce Jay Friedman's razor-sharp wit and keen observation of the genus American male (from the 1950s to the present) have the power to make men laugh and women weep. He has written highly acclaimed novels ("Stern," "A Mother's Kisses"), hilarious books of nonfiction ("The Lonely Guy," made into a movie starring Steve Martin, and "The Slightly Older Guy,") a hit Broadway play ("Steambath"), two hit movies ("Stir Crazy," "Splash"), and short stories published everywhere from Playboy to The Antioch Review. Many of the stories were published a decade ago in "The Collected Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman," and now a fresh batch has arrived in "Three Balconies."

The title story is Friedman at his best, somehow managing to turn what begins as wry comedy into a searing and painfully credible tale of a man on the brink of suicide. Harry is a 60-year-old writer whose career is on the wane. He is told by a Hollywood agent that his name "no longer comes up on the radar screen." The director of a small theater advises him to "thread a Diane Sawyer type" through the plot of his play about the Siege of Malta - "someone covering the siege for some medieval publication," - and he's desperate enough to give it a shot.

Harry hopes to refresh himself and his work on a trip to Miami Beach. He's happily married but still loves the company of women; when he finds a bevy of attractive young females partying every night at the bar of his hotel, he forgets about his problematic play. He revels in mixing it up with the tanned young beauties in the bar, happy with nothing more than the "pursuit," until the fatal third night, when he meets the most gorgeous one of all and fantasizes about seducing her. She says she has observed him the last two nights and thinks he is "very courageous."

" 'Because I'm old?' said Harry.

" 'No, no, no,' said Miriam Rosen, but the two extra no's were confirmation that he had read her correctly."

Betrayed by his age, Harry slinks off to a remote strip club for a nightmarish lap dance. As he sits on the balcony of his 18th-story hotel suite the next morning, he fears that he might "hop over the railing and bring down the curtain once and for all." The balcony now seems like a ledge, and he realizes, to his horror, that the new condo he has purchased in a not-yet-completed building features three balconies. Harry convinces himself that he should return to his work; he will deal with "one balcony at a time."

Friedman deals in a similar comic-turned-serious manner with another of his frequent themes in "Mr. Wimbledon." The favorite activity of Siegel, a well-off manufacturer who "had achievements in bullet-proof sportswear," is engaging in a "favorite activity - looking for evidence of hostility to the Jews." On a tennis vacation in the Northwest, his WASP girlfriend "found a club for him, one that anyone could join; as a result it had no members." In an argument with a Jewish couple on the next court, an anti-Semitic slang term is shouted. Siegel hears "a word dredged up from his childhood, like a dirty animal in a cellar. He was shocked when he realized the voice was his own, but also gratified that he had finally found the enemy."

Insights often come in these stories when the author deftly reverses the roles assigned by society. An architect's own psychiatrist arrives at his door one morning, looking for therapeutic help in "The Reversal." Dr. Gold explains to his client that "I thought I'd change the game plan and try the unorthodox. It's worked for me before. I once got sound advice from a building superintendent."

Friedman reveals male fantasies in all their embarrassing political incorrectness. Men may have a hilarious shock of recognition over stories like "Kneesocks," when a middle-aged man meets a beautiful woman he had a crush on in college. "The thought of her long slender legs in kneesocks made him dizzy. He wanted to run right off with her and have her put some on for him."

The best (and largely futile) efforts of the middle-class American male who came of age in the 1950s to deal with the current scene is expressed by Harry in "Three Balconies": "Was it possible he just liked to be with women? One of his favorite things was when he met someone he had at one time thought of as a 'pretty young thing,' somebody's assistant, and have her turn out to be a leading neurophysiologist. Or a feared litigator . . . . Harry was delighted by this change in the culture. How could he not be? In his lifetime - as a phenomenon - he ranked it right up there with the overnight collapse of communism."

I know, I know: The truth is we ought to be home anyway, it's way past our bedtime. And look what happened to Harry.

The Last of the Summer Wine: A New York Times Review of Friedman's Three Balconies

by Charles Taylor

A friend of mine had an uncle who, years after surviving a concentration camp, would respond to every petty inconvenience and irritation by exclaiming, “First the Holocaust. Now this!” That expectation of suffering, greeted with more shrug than outrage, is at the heart of much Jewish humor. You can find it in many of the stories that make up Bruce Jay Friedman’s “Three Balconies.”

Just listen to these opening lines:

“It was a dark time for Dugan.” “Herbert Plotkin did not so much appear in Jacob’s new neighborhood as he seemed to loom up out of nowhere.” “Alexander Kahn, a failed novelist, and at best a marginal producer of off-Broadway plays.. . .” “The blindfold had been removed.” And, of course, the ever-popular “The Jews killed Christ.” Hear any of those — but particularly that last one — and you’d have to be a little touched to feel like whistling “Maytime.”

Friedman, whose work includes plays (“Scuba Duba,” “Steambath”), novels (“A Mother’s Kisses”), nonfiction (“The Lonely Guy”), and screenplays (“Stir Crazy”), is in something of a dark mood. Which isn’t to say that he’s stopped being funny, only that we still have to point out that darkness and comedy are not a contradiction. Friedman is aware of that. Why else start one of the three stories here about his old protagonist, the screenwriter Harry Towns, with the sentence “As is the case with most men, Harry wanted to be taken seriously and resented the suggestion that he was not a serious man.” In the novella that ends the book, “The Great Beau LeVyne,” a writer rises in self-righteous indignation at a literary conference, points to Beau, the narrator, and announces, “I’m not funny.” As a declaration of somber intent, that’s a pip, but see if anybody wants to have a drink with you.

That blowhard is remembered with more amusement than indignation. Friedman turned 78 this year, and many of the protagonists in “Three Balconies” are older, looking back on their lives, remembering old rivals and allies — the difference, at this distance, seeming not so great as perhaps it once was. Even the ones ruing lost time are caught up in the comedy of aging rather than in its tragedy. The story “Neck and Neck” reads as an illustration of the old adage “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” You can’t help laughing at the protagonist, a writer paralyzed by the success that seems to come effortlessly to his chief rival. The writer in “Joined at the Hip,” driven to murder by the slick-talking theatrical producer who costs him his confidence, is described in terms that we’ve come to associate with the image of the leonine Hemingway­esque writer, linking his productivity to his virility. Friedman treats that as grandiloquent delusion.

Writers, as a group, are so vain and so given to complaining that it’s no wonder there’s practically a subgenre of fiction about the suffering of writers. That’s why it’s always such a treat when a writer like Friedman (or Stephen King in “The Dark Half” or “The Shining”) puts that kind of self-pity in its place. (And it’s why Harry Towns, largely free of that self-pity, is so appealing a character.)

Some of the stories here are a bit too clever. The opener, “The Secret Man,” and a few others, like “The Convert” and “The Investigative Reporter,” rely too much on easy, and heavy-handed, ironies. The intent to instruct gives the killjoy the upper hand over the entertainer.

Friedman saves the best for last. Perhaps the model for the protagonist of “The Great Beau LeVyne” will be obvious to readers who, like Friedman, were part of the New York literary scene of the 1960s (or the Hollywood scene in the ’70s). You don’t have to know who he was, though, to recognize the sort of wildly charismatic, self-destructive, marginally crazy figure who gravitates to the fringes of the arts, sustained by friends and contacts and, often, a con man’s charm. It’s easy to believe in the sort of madman so hyped up on his own macho fantasies that he chooses restaurants as the place to challenge both Bill Russell and Crazy Joe Gallo.

“The Great Beau LeVyne” — the very name conjures up someone who’s half good old boy, half gigolo — is one of those pieces of writing rife with the names of cities and restaurants and the people who inhabited them. But Friedman isn’t name-dropping. He’s evoking the glamour and cachet they once possessed, and doing it in the name of affectionate, though cleareyed, remembrance. On the last page he writes of LeVyne, “If his intention was to make us feel his absence, he succeeded brilliantly.” That’s what Friedman has done for the era he remembers so vividly.

D. M. Thomas on Bruce Jay Friedman's Three Balconies

A Google Alert came through this morn, linking to D. M. Thomas's blog. D. M. Thomas wrote, most famously, The White Hotel. Writing about what he is reading right now, Don writes: But I can now read other writers' fiction, as I don't allow myself to do while I'm writing, and I have a very good book to indulge myself in: Three Balconies, by the American writer Bruce Jay Friedman, a collection of short stories and a novella. The short stories are real, funny, wry, observant and written with grace. It will sustain me in this sad interim.

PIF Magazine reviews Three Balconies

He’s back. And for that we should be thankful. Of course, Bruce Jay Friedman never really went anywhere. It’s just that Friedman, who was at the top of the literary heap with his hilarious, dark, comic novels, Stern and A Mother’s Kisses, not to mention his successful plays, Scuba Duba and Steambath, seems to have been in the Witness Protection Program for the past decade or so.

But you can’t keep a good man down, and so now we have Three Balconies, a welcome collection of 17 short stories, three of which, “The Thespian,” “The People Person,” and “The Great Beau LeVyne,” (which, at a mere 30 pages certainly stretches the definition of novella, but what the hell) have never seen the light of day before now. Most of the others were previously published in magazines like Esquire and Playboy. Yes, some of the stories are dated, but what’s wrong with that? Others, no matter when they were written, are timeless.

Friedman has never really been interested in well-adjusted winners, but rather those on the way up or down, or even better, those going nowhere fast. The neurotic, the unhappy, the malcontent, the put-upon, the outsider, that’s patented Friedman territory, and we’re the better for it. But the beauty of it is that Friedman never makes fun of his characters. Instead, they are drawn so sharply and with such understanding, that even though we might feel a twinge of pity for them (okay, sometimes a bit more than a twinge,) we certainly don’t feel guilty laughing at them. In large part, this is because one suspects that they represent a not so hidden side of Friedman himself.

In “Fit as a Fiddle,” we are introduced to Dugan who, “though he was hale, if not hearty, at sixty-two, his friends were dropping like flies.” And so, it logically follows that Dugan would be obsessed with his own well-being, which results in a nice comic payoff.

In “Neck and Neck,” Friedman writes of the writer Baum, and his arch rival Albert P. Wiener, both of whom were named “as two of the most promising artists of the Post-World War Two era.” But as Wiener (that name is obviously not chosen carelessly and could he possibly be a Philip Roth stand-in?) rises, Baum settles into mediocrity bordering on oblivion. As they age together, try as he might, Baum can’t quite reach the heights of his nemesis whose success seriously throws him off his game. Perhaps there can be second acts in America. But you’ll have to read this story to find out how.

In “The Thespian,” we have Harry, a former Hollywood screenwriter, now asked by an ex-girlfriend to play a small role in a movie she’s producing. Following the wisdom, “’There are no small parts,’” he said, quoting someone he’d heard on the Bravo channel, “’only small actors,’” Harry agrees. Besides, maybe it’s a way to get back into the game. “Your name,” a Hollywood agent had told him, “no longer comes up on the radar screen.” He’s asked to play a rare book dealer with, as his daughter points out, “…three lines and one of them is ‘hi.’” But Harry is “relieved to see that his third line had to do with Pushkin and seemed to be central to the plot. Harry had never actually read Pushkin, but he knew a lot about Pushkin. He felt he could really sink his teeth into the Pushkin line.” Vintage Friedman.

Some of the stories, like The Reversal, are a bit too predictable and fall a little flat, but that’s more than made up for by “The Convert,” and “The Great Beau LeVyne,” which showcase Friedman at his dyspeptic albeit comic best.

Good to have you back, Bruce Jay, and hope you’re working on something longer.

by Charles Salzberg

Three Balconies is "as good as it gets."

Today's Globe & Mail review:

Friedman in fine form

JOSEPH KERTES

November 22, 2008

THREE BALCONIES

By Bruce Jay Friedman

Biblioasis, 203 pages, $26.95

What a treat it is to have new fiction from Bruce Jay Friedman, this one a volume of stories, a couple of humorous sketches and a novella. Three Balconies brings together some uncollected stories, or stories written since the landmark Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman, published more than a decade ago, and complements an impressive body of work: eight novels, including Stern, About Harry Towns and The Current Climate; five volumes of short fiction; five screenplays, including Stir Crazy; three plays, including Scuba Duba; and four books of non-fiction, including The Lonely Guy and The Slightly Older Guy.

What is it about Friedman's work that is so appealing? When we can stand back a little and look at it at the level of the line, we realize that we are witnessing a triumph of language, of street idiom. As in great music, in which one note follows naturally upon another, not a word is out of place in Friedman, and not a word has been written to impress. These are the words of the office, the diner, the golf course, the bedroom and the bar.

In Neck and Neck, a rival author asks Baum, the protagonist, "Why do you waste your time on movies? All that counts is the novel. Nothing else. Nada. Nada. Nada." Baum is stung by the remark: "One Nada would have been sufficient," he remarks.

In The Thespian, Harry's wife, Julie, has taught Harry "to say 'I love you' at the end of all conversations, whether he felt like it or not. On automatic now, he had once said 'I love you' to his accountant."

Friedman's world is one of Everyman and Everywoman, a world of imperfections, one in which dreams don't quite get realized. His alter ego, Harry Towns, who has not quite become the great novelist or great screenwriter he has always aspired to be, is asked by an old flame to play a bit part in a feature film of hers. In the role, he works the cash in a bookstore and is to ask the lead nothing more than, "May I interest you in Pushkin?" But feeling confident in his delivery, "the bit firmly between his teeth, Harry gave a colourful account of Pushkin's fatal duel with his wife's paramour, raising the possibility that the poet's rival, D'Anthes, might have cheated by wearing a steel vest. He described in detail Pushkin's final moments and Nicholas II's graciousness in not only settling the poet's debts, but also establishing a trust fund for his family. 'Can you imagine an American President doing that for his family?' "

In The Investigative Reporter, Alexander Kahn, the novelist and journalist, hates his own dull life, visits a prison and ends up lighting up a joint within view of the guards. In The Secret Man, Jacob challenges the neighbourhood tough guy, only to see him back down. Jacob learns in later years that, as a consequence, he was viewed as something of a bully himself. In Kneesocks, Harry Towns, who has never gotten over being dumped by a girlfriend in college, sees her again 25 years later. He realizes "the fit wasn't quite right" - it never has been, and the encounter serves to fortify his love of Julie, waiting for him at home.

Friedman is great at encapsulating people as they strive heartily within the confines of their lives. In The Great Beau LeVyne, Heidi is a "slender raven-haired woman with exquisite skin and patrician features whose flesh was cold to the touch. As I was later to learn, she had been a Homecoming Queen at the University of Missouri, majored in political science and then veered off to become a curator at the Indian Museum. She now spoke with an English accent that was convincing."

In Fit as a Fiddle, Liebermann, "his long time editor, keeled over at his desk, as if he had grown weary of reading introspective first novels."

While Friedman's characters rarely despair enough to take their own lives (with one notable exception in this volume), in the title story, Harry is lured to the railing of one of the three balconies in his new Miami condominium. His "Two Big Pictures" are a distant memory, his image as a gentleman and lover are fading, his inspiration is fleeting, yet he knows still where to look for hope. He "would deal with the balconies one at a time. Wasn't that what life was about - taking it one balcony at a time?

"If that wasn't a philosophy, he didn't know what was."

In these stories, Bruce Jay Friedman blends his brand of humour with a kind of sadness and darkness that sneaks up on you and reminds you of that old adage of Mark Twain, that "the true source of humour is not joy but sorrow."

This is as good as it gets. Treat yourself to Three Balconies.

Joe Kertes is dean of the School of Creative and Performing Arts at Humber College. His most recent novel is Gratitude.

St. Louis Dispatch review of Three Balconies

From the St. Louis Dispatch, a review of Friedman's Three Balconies. Friedman will be in St. Louis as part of the Jewish Bookfair there this Friday.

Prankster Friedman reveals his alter ego

By Amy Woods Butler

SPECIAL TO THE POST-DISPATCH

11/04/2008

"As is the case with most men, Harry wanted to be taken seriously and resented the suggestion that he was not a serious man," begins one of the stories in "Three Balconies." "Yet there may have been some truth to the charge."

It's a theme taken up again and again in this delightful new collection by Bruce Jay Friedman. Harry, an aging writer and the charming protagonist of three of the book's stories, weighs his literary output against the years he spent chasing women and churning out Hollywood scripts. Alexander, a failed novelist, dreams of escape through prison, while the writer Baum is stymied by the success of his prolific nemesis.

Not failures, exactly, each of the characters looks back on his life with a sense of good-natured puzzlement. Whether his name is Baum, Harry or Alexander, the protagonist in most of the stories is in essence the same person, given to the same preoccupations. By the time Friedman, who penned the screenplays for the hit movies "Splash" and "Stir Crazy," has a character repeatedly mention his Two Big Pictures, it's impossible not think of all these Harrys as tweaked versions of the author himself. In a departure from the strictly realistic style, several stories read like off-beat fantasies, riffs on daydreams that end with a twist. This is Friedman in prankster-mode, and you can almost hear him chuckle as he has his bit of fun. In the hilarious "The People Person," an unnamed president with ties to Texas is abducted and "tortured" with literature. In "The Reversal," a troubled psychiatrist unburdens himself to a long-time patient.

Though humorous, not all of these lighter pieces are successful, and one wonders whether it's precisely this kind of work that fuels the self-doubt of his alter-ego in Friedman's more serious stories. If so, they are worth it.

A graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia, Friedman will appear on the Missouri's Own panel at the Jewish Book Festival with local authors Jody Feldman ("The Gollywhopper Games") and Joanna Campbell Slan ("Paper, Scissors, Death."

Let's Here It For A Writing Guy: a first review of Bruce Jay Friedman's Three Balconies

Over at CultureCatch there's what I believe is the first review of Bruce Jay Friedman's Three Balconies. There will be many more: Globe, N.Y. Times, Boston Globe, Forward, the Believer, elsewhere. Though this one is a good start.

Let’s Hear It for the Writing Guy

September 11, 2008 - 17:11 — Ken Krimstein

Three Balconies: Stories and a Novella
by Bruce Jay Friedman (Biblioasis)

Time was serious writers wrote to entertain audiences. Not entertain in the “anything for a laugh” style we’re so accustomed to, but to move, to captivate, to probe, to scare, to inspire, to confuse. From Dickens to Tolstoy to Chandler to O’Connor to Lardner to Dahl to, even, Hemingway, these artists used stories and storytelling to get to people. These days movies, and mostly crappy movies, have taken over this role. Short stories, at least “literary stories,” have become the province of minute movements, domestic dramas often featuring despondent creative writing professors who write literary short stories. Entertaining? Perhaps to a select group of members of the MLA. Of course some masters such as T. C. Boyle can still pop off a whiz-bang, and Stuart Dybek probes inner realms of consciousness, but overall, to be respected, you gotta be boring. Boring.

Into this somber salon bursts Bruce Jay Friedman. Never one for the pieties of literary minimalism, Friedman simply writes like a bastard. I mean this in the best sense. He tells stories, with a unique point of view, that give the reader, no, that take the reader, on a ride. Like a boxer, Friedman assaults you, even when he’s being quiet. His words dance, graze, and sometimes pummel, and when they connect, they do so by planting a smile (more often a smirk) on your lips.

I’ll be blunt. These stories are FUN to read. Is that bad? Well, is Pink Floyd bad because they’re fun to listen to, or is Federer bad because he’s fun to watch?

I’ll let you answer that one.

Friedman came up in an era of superstars, especially in his designated niche. Roth, Bellow, Malamud - big hitters. Despite writing a couple of seminal (pun intended) and critically acclaimed Jewish American Guilt novels, Friedman has possibly suffered because he’s too good of a writer, too flexible, too able to tell stories in any genre. But this is a guy (and if ever there was a writer who deserved that tag, it’s BJF) who grew up editing men’s adventure magazines. A mainstay of Playboy and the glory days of Esquire and Elaine’s, his Harry Towns character is one of the great (to use another Friedmanism) American literary heroes. (Or is he an anti-hero?) Towns, who figures in a few stories in Friedman’s latest delectable collection, is a too honest, too guilty, too sweet, too nasty creature. He is ruled by his ex-wife, his child, and his libido. He could not be a woman. He could only be a certain kind of American man at a certain time, and that’s another way of saying, Towns is so expertly observed and drawn that he is all of us – everyman.

To get back to, or rather, to get to Friedman’s latest book, Three Balconies: Stories and a Novella, it’s a delight. As befits Friedman’s punchy persona, what he calls a novella, his The Great Beau Levyne, would be considered a vignette in a collection by many other contemporary short story writers. No matter. The tale, a rare foray into first person, and with a position of pride at the end of the book, captures a life. Its scope is grand, and it delivers. Many of the other stories in the collection touch on, and master, tactics and techniques ranging from moderately surreal to downright hilarious to Roald Dahlian irony. These are like O’Henry, or Maupassant, or Saki: short, sharp, shocks. Enjoyable, but not confections.

For example, Joined at the Hip is the kind of story Alfred Hitchcock or an HBO-ready version of Rod Serling would have loved to put on their shows. The dark, twisted stinger at the end is not contrived, a difficult task to pull off for that kind of surprise ending story. Instead, the zinger Friedman so expertly builds to resonates like a fable from Aesop. Makes you wonder how Friedman would tackle horror, or an essay or two, or a full-fledged novel.

Not every track in Three Balconies may be to your taste, or a masterpiece. But even on Sgt. Pepper’s, not every song is A Day in the Life. But the whole thing is FUN, and not too shabby when it comes to Art (with a cap “a”) either.

Go ahead, enjoy. It won’t kill you. - Ken Krimstein

Bruce Jay Friedman, Kurt Vonnegut and Dan Wakefield on Charlie Rose

Tonight, at the Rubin in New York City, Bruce Jay Friedman introduced his film Stir Crazy (with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder) (other Friedman films and adaptations include Steve Martin's The Lonely Guy, based on the Friedman novel, The Heartbreak Kid, based upon a short story, and Splash! (for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, among others) and unofficially launched our Three Balconies, set for release on Monday, September 15th. Three Balconies is his first collection of short fiction in near twenty years, but is a return to form for a writer viewed by many as a modern American master. The LA TIMES has said "Friedman has earned a permanent place on the shelf on contemporary American letters. " While searching the internet I found an interview with Heidi Julavitz who claims Friedman as one of the trendsetters of American literature, out-Rothing Roth many years before the latter became famous. But also one of the forgotten writers, at least insofar as a younger generation goes. Here's a bit from the interview:

Dave: Part of The Believer's agenda as you've expressed it is to turn readers on to books and authors they don't know. So what has editing the magazine turned you on to?

Julavits: A lot of stuff. That's what fabulous about this. For example, Bruce Jay Friedman. Do you know him?

Dave: No.

Julavits: It's funny because no one our age has heard of him. Well, Ben has because he's actually a fifty-year-old in a thirty-five-year-old's body. But I gave a reading in what is known here as the "other" Portland: Portland, Maine. Someone asked me a question like this and I mentioned Bruce Jay Friedman. Everybody there because, of course, it was all my parents' friends they'd all heard of him, they'd all read him. It was crazy.

He's from Brooklyn. He wrote a book called The Dick. I think what happened to him and this is according to the essay, which I'm currently editing the character was very racist. Then the question is, Is the author racist? Conflating the ideas in the book with the person who created it. Anatole Boyard, I guess, reviewed it for the Times and just buried him forever and ever. Rest in peace. One of those reviews you don't come back from. But Friedman is someone who has really influenced a lot of people. I guess Woody Allen has put him in his movies, given him cameos. He actually wrote a book that's very much like Portnoy's Complaint, but he did it about five years beforehand. I kind of agree with the thesis that this writer is working on, which is that sometimes when the first person does it, it opens a door, but it's the next person who gets all the credit. Bruce Jay Friedman was a trendsetter in all these ways, but whoever walked those paths next, they're the ones we think of culturally as being the instigators of these things. So he's one.

As it happens, the October issue of the Believer will have a long interview with Bruce. And we've managed to line up a lot more coverage that should break shortly. We'll keep you posted.

For now, here's an interview with Friedman, Vonnegut and Wakefield on Charlie Rose. An oldie, but a good one.

/www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xqg-MM3Yuc

Even better, a podcast by Friedman, as part of a Key West Literary Seminar, entitled "I Lost it At the movies," where he recounts the making of The Heartbreak Kid (the original, not the recent re-adaptation by Ben Stiller) and reads the entire story.

www.keywestliteraryseminar.org/lit/podcasts/mp3/brucejfriedman.mp3