Shimmer

Los Angeles Times

[Schulman's] gift is her characters' capacity for grace under pressure, and her special charm is her generous, sensual, and quite exhilarating observations of women...[Her] voice is comic, engaging, alternately hectoring and caressing. It is a New York voice, struggling to liberate itself from received notions about love and identity.

Kathy Acker

In [Schulman's] descriptions, the smells of New York are as sensual as the smells of a lover's body, and the apparitions, the visions that have raised themselves out of the chaos or the nothingness that is the New York streets, can be as hideous as that hatred which can accompany sexual love. -- Village Voice

Library Journal

The far from idyllic 1940s and 1950s--when friends and co-workers openly suspected one's loyalty--form the backdrop for Schulman's Rat Bohemia, LJ 8/95 latest, beautifully written novel. Out of this insecurity emerge three people who fret, go to work, feel the pressures to conform, and, in many ways, resist them. Smug, self-righteous Austin Van Cleeve writes a gossip column for a New York paper. Sylvia Golubowsky, a stenographer at the New York Star, believes that intelligence, dependability, and hard work will advance her into a reporter's job. And struggling black actor and playwright Calvin Byfield refuses to write stereotypical parts. Somehow, the tributaries of these three lives cross each other, and, in the course of the book, the reader witnesses these narrators hold onto their dignity and good names even as they lose more tangible commodities. Schulman sketches in loads of colorful details from 1950s New York City. Full of compassion and honesty, this book forces the reader to identify with the plucky characters in standing up to a climate of fear. An amazing book; highly recommended for all public libraries. [For another important work by Schulman, see Stagestruck, reviewed on p. 93.--Ed.]--Lisa S. Nussbaum, Euclid P.L., OH

Louise Rafkin

Shimmer, Sarah Schulman's fifth novel, sets us in her home stomping grounds of New York City in the midst of the not-so-pretty, turbulent era of the late 1940s and '50s. Narrated by a trio of widely different characters, the novel credibly weaves these lives with a full range of historical facts and references to give a vivid picture of postwar Manhattan.

Brooklyn-born Sylvia Golubowsky diligently works her way up through the steno pool at a prominent newspaper, only to find her coveted reporter's job awarded to her politically naive brother solely on the basis of his gender. With parents who are unsympathetic about her plans for a career, and a brother, formerly her closest ally, who sells her out for a shot at his own fame, Sylvia finds herself adrift in her Manhattan digs without any familial support. As her aspirations are thwarted by various roadblocks, her initial naïveté transforms into a thick hide, and she becomes both savvy and bitter about the discriminating ways of the world.

Trailing Sylvia for several decades, Schulman explores what kinds of options were open to an ambitious, intelligent gay woman during an era when women were best appreciated for their looks and measure of agreeability. Despite her disappointment, Sylvia understands that "certain personality types slit our own throats because we have to. We can't help it, we're about something larger than ourselves."

Next door to Sylvia live Carolina and Cal, an interracial couple whose lives are revealed through the voice of Tammi Byfield, a contemporary black graduate student who has discovered her grandfather Cal's diary. While Cal, also a graduate student and an aspiring African-American playwright, battles both blatant and insidious racism in the trendy theater world, Caroline, a white jazz pianist, struggles to straddle several worlds, black and white, straight and gay, without falling through the cracks.

The gritty voice of gossip columnist Austin Van Cleeve, an unlikable personal climber and political schemer, rounds out the story, giving the inside voice of the rabid and vicious political right. Van Cleeve, a relentless womanizer, racist, and anticommunist, is fueled by his monomaniacal desire to manipulate information -- which he manages to do with unsettling ease.

Covering nearly half a century, Schulman's characters dramatize how lives are affected -- and often effectively ruined -- by the political machinations of history, and how that history is embodied in specific acts and carried out through deliberate personal actions. At the close of the novel, in 1996, on the occasion of Clinton's attacks on welfare, Tammi Byfield's Jamaican boyfriend asks, "What is wrong with your country? How could anyone be so cruel? Who would make this happen?"

Exactly. A lively, compelling, and instructive read, Schulman's novel reveals the untidy history and gritty reality beneath New York City's superficial shimmer.
— Louise Rafkin, barnesandnoble.com

Kirkus Reviews

A pretentious fairy tale of post-war New York by philosopher-novelist Schulman (Rat Bohemia), who tries—with a lot of cultural name-dropping and the usual references to Joseph McCarthy—to introduce us to an era and place that we have met many times already. Three characters, all poster pics for causes and opinions, tell the story, which begins in 1948 but often flits to the present: Sylvia Golubowsky (an aspiring newspaper reporter, the lesbian daughter of Jewish immigrants); Tammi Byfield (a black graduate student writing a thesis on her grandfather's memoirs of the period); and Austin Van Cleeve (a viciously stereotyped, reactionary WASP gossip columnist).

Times are bad for good lefties like Sylvia, who just wants to be an ace reporter on the New York paper where she starts off in the typing pool. Her parents won't support her ambitions, her brother Lou (a political sell-out) gets her dream job, and Austin (a tireless schemer and lecher) finally gets newspaper editor Jim O'Dwyer to fire all the Communists on his staff—including her. Meanwhile, Tammi learns from her grandfather Cal Byfield's memoirs that he was briefly married to white jazz pianist and free-spirit Caroline, but because of racial prejudices of the time he couldn't get his plays produced. Instead, he flipped hamburgers at a greasy spoon. Sylvia eventually has an affair with Caroline and makes a new life for herself in Vermont; Tammi learns to her relief that she does not have a white grandmother, since grandpa Cal divorced Caroline and married black, and she prepares at the end to fight injustice and learn from Cal's suffering. Austin is dying at the story's close, but he is still very richand nasty and takes comfort that President Clinton has abolished welfare. Agitprop, pure and simple: The physical details of the period are nicely evoked, but the story itself is more a crude rant than a perceptive reprise of an era.