Leonard Michaels was born in New York in 1933 and spent his last decade in Tuscany. He spoke Yiddish until he was six and a good deal of Italian before he died. In the half-century between, he wrote in English and taught literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Some claim him as one of the masters of style of his period.
That style is unadorned. "The difficulty of writing in a plain style was how easy it was," he said in a Paris Review interview in 1998, and we are told by acquaintances that he could rewrite a sentence up to 20 times. The sparseness and perfectionism relate to innate honesty. Michaels does not pump up his material; he does not dramatise. He reports, and by reporting reveals truths that fictionalising might tend to distort.
Sylvia (Daunt Books, £9.99) is a tidy instance of his characteristic operation on the borderland between fact and representation. It is an acknowledged account of his relationship with his first wife, who committed suicide in 1963.
Some passages are taken straight from his journals; others are from memory and may veer into the less reliable arenas where autobiography can stray. Michaels's most memorable course at Berkeley was about this territory, beginning with the Confessions of St Augustine.
Sylvia began life as a memoir but was called "novel" in its ultimate publication in the USA in 1990. It is now available in Britain for the first time in elegant paperback from Daunt Books. In truth, Sylvia is a novella and appeared first at the end of a collection of short stories, a genre in which its author began and at which the narrator of this "novel" is making attempts.
Aspects of Sylvia's pathology include her jealousy of his retreats into his "hole" and rage at the clack of his Olivetti, even though she has bought it for him.
"I have no job, no job, no job. I'm not published. I have nothing to say. I'm married to a madwoman," the narrator tells us in one of the inclusions from Michaels's journals. This confession casts a luminous shadow over what otherwise amounts to forensic study of Sylvia's "madness". She is forever blaming him for what is happening to her - unfairly, the narrative suggests.
But how complete is this truth? We only have his testimony. Other interpretations may emerge between the lines. And this skilful, often tormented author undoubtedly knew it.
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