Empathy Read Free Page A

Lucy, comes in the middle of the book because, in classical epic, that’s where the voyage down to Hell traditionally appears. “At the next table was a fashionable, clean-cut Japanese man dressed exactly like a fashionable clean-cut American man circa 1962. Only now that look has come back. You know, the nerd look. Tortoiseshell eyeglasses, khaki bermuda shorts, and white sneakers.” It’s so hot that sand stings through her shoes. “Kids were following us the whole time and I could smell my own flesh broiling.” And everywhere they go, people tell them that Bali is “baguse,” meaning cool. It’s an Orwellian vision of language turned
inward to fertilize a lie. In a world without connection, there’s no in, and no out. There’s no more there, thus there’s no more here.

“Now we may perhaps to begin?”
    I’ve had the strangest experience re-reading Empathy for the purposes of writing this essay. All kinds of feelings are returning, like the pins and needles feeling you get in your extremities after a long stillness. “Déjà vu” doesn’t cover it. Late in the novel, two of Doc’s patients, Jo and Sam, rehearse their Virginia Woolf neurosis in playlet form. “You’re a hundred percent wrong, a hundred percent wrong, a hundred percent wrong.” Reading this passage, I flashed on an evening fifteen years ago, when I created the part of Jo on stage in a bookstore in San Francisco during an evening of “Poets’ Theater.” This was the very same bookstore that was turned into a swamp by US federal agents in Swamp. Christian Huygen played Sam and I was Jo, and as you’ll see, the play “Failure” begins with us kissing in the last minutes of bliss before a decisive argument. Our kiss lasted long enough for me to feel aroused and heady. We were directed to stay kissing until it became uncomfortable. And when “Sam” laid into me with his repeated, ever more vicious declarations that I was “one hundred percent wrong,” tears stung my eyelids; I felt my face grow red in front of the whole room. I knew I was “acting,” that Christian wasn’t really my boyfriend, that he didn’t hate me, and yet physics reached in and grabbed my ankles, knocking me on my ass. As the play reached its climax, I was shaking with grief, flayed. People in the audience clapped and cheered, but I only caught that on tape, much later; in the heat of the moment I kept quaking and blinking, my whole world torn out beneath me. And thus this little playlet might serve as emblematic of the apparently loose, baggy structure of the novel it wound up in. As you’ll find out sooner or later, Empathy is in portmanteau form and contains everything but the kitchen sink (and
in fact it does have a kitchen sink in it too). Is it a miscellany, pure and simple? If so, in this book (and in its equally excellent successor, Rat Bohemia), Schulman found a way to bring life back to the novel, which in effect is the same as bringing life back to, well, life. Now we may perhaps to begin?
    Â 
    - San Francisco, December 2005

Empathy is dedicated to David, Gloria,
Helen, Charlie, Isabel, and in memory of Dora
Leibling Yevish, born in Tarnopl, Austro-Hungary,
on Rosh Hashana 1899 - died in New York
City on February 19, 1982.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    I am very grateful to all my friends who gave me invaluable support during the development of this novel. In particular, I offer special thanks to Deborah Karpel with love and appreciation and to the following individuals:
    Bettina Berch, Peg Byron, Lesly Gevirtz, Steve Berman, Diane Cleaver, Carl George, Lesly Curtis, Anne Christine D’Adesky, Jackie Woodson, Ruth Karpel, Ochiichi August Moon, Su Friedrich, Jim Hubbard, Kenny Fries (whose observations on the phrase SILENCE = DEATH are incorporated into this manuscript), Cecilia Dougherty, Carla Harryman, Bo Huston, Dan Carmell, Rachel