Richard Michael Levine is a journalist whose sharp eye for social commentary infuses his fiction debut in this terrific and often hallucinatory collection of short stories, The Man Who Gave Away His Organs. Subtitled “Tales of Love and Obsession from Mid-Life,” the eight stories and one novella explore varying terrains of love, especially in the wake of loss, experienced by well-meaning but neurotic characters who have reached the third act of their lives and are still searching. The narrators and main characters are mostly male and mostly Jewish, and Levine mines their quests and neuroses with a dark humor that is alternately hilarious and disturbing.
One of Levine’s primary interests (or obsessions) seems to be that seemingly conventional lives can take a sudden sharp turn off the tracks or into bizarre waters at mid-life. The title story, “The Man Who Gave Away His Organs,” constructs an extraordinary tale of a man, Ed, who suddenly, after more than two decades in a seemingly happy marriage and stable career, begins to donate his bodily organs, one by one, in order to give life to others--and slowly shed his own. Levine doesn’t psychoanalyze Ed--was it a religious conversion (his decision to become a bone marrow donor happened at temple on Yom Kippur)? Is he suddenly giving expression to a long-felt need to be someone else? Early in his marriage another character had described his career switch from artist to accountant as “an evolutionary anomaly: a butterfly that turns into a caterpillar.” Had he spent the intervening years as a caterpillar longing to again become a butterfly? Levine gives us plenty to ponder, and we believe in Ed.
A very different story where lives go off the rails is “Tlac,” an unsettling tale told in the style of magical realism about what happens to a good marriage when a child is lost. Grief alternately unites and separates the parents, as the husband becomes passive and withdrawn while the wife pursues a bizarre search for meaning in ancient Aztec rituals. The devastating finale is a stunning act of creative imagination. And the culinary descriptions alone make this story unforgettable.