You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. My guest today is

Leonard Michaels, the author most recently of a novel, Sylvia, published by Mercury House. It follows

from a selection from his journals called Shuffle, published recently by Faris Strauss and Giroux.

He's the author as well of two books of short stories, going places, and I would have saved them if I could,

as well as an earlier novel called The Men's Club. Several of his recent stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthologies as well as the Best American Essays.

You commented in the essay on Gilda and Rita Hayworth that appears in the current Best American Essays volume,

that humiliation seems like an important subject in film as well as in fiction and stories

as well. And it seems as if Sylvia has deep at its core a sense of personal humiliation.

And I wondered if you could begin by talking about that.

Well, it's certainly present in the book, and there is, in fact, the scene in the book

where the idea of humiliation and, in a sense, our unconscious relation to it is crystallized.

In this particular scene, the narrator is driving to work with a colleague and a friend, and the friend who's driving is gay, and he likes to tell a narrator

what he does in his social life and in his erotic life.

And the narrator who is fairly innocent that doesn't know a hell of a lot about the world

listens to these stories with a great deal of fascination.

And one day, the guy's driving him to work says that he knows somebody who was asked by his lover to wear braces because it turned

them on. In any event, the narrator then says something like, I don't remember the exact words,

but he says something like, who would do that? Well, the irony is, of course, that the narrator

is living a life that is far more degraded and indeed

...