The author Jascha Kessler's short fictions are masterpieces of wit,quirky observation on well excavated personas,a continuous merry-go-round of provocative narrative which never lets the reader down. RAPID TRANSIT presents another challenge: written in first person, present-tense this early full length novel is raw -the emotions of the anti-hero shaking with the effects of the second world war. It is not difficult to see how RAPID TRANSIT is really the ground of consciousness for Kessler's brilliant short fiction that follows. The evocation of a young man's precocious universe,,,Celine-esque, is literary of course, but the narrative has compelling reality and quirkiness which defines Kessler's writing DNA.One is drawn into the roar of the historical/sexual narrative: 1940's in the Bronx was never more more sexy.Take the ride!

RAPID TRANSIT, the "story" of a young man's intellectual and emotional odyssey through a few months in a post-World War II Bronx neighborhood. It is a brilliant tour de force in which speech, direct written speech is the mode. The protagonist, Ted, libidinous, iconoclastic, philosophically-inclined, is a conflicted modern Jewish Dedalus. Hearing this anti-hero tell day-by-day of his search for certainties in our mid-century, amoral morass where Aristotelian logic simply doesn't apply and only the "anarchy of desire" reigns is an experience well worth some effort.

From the tough street kid whose teeth are knocked out when trying to defend his heritage, to the adolescent's first amorous gropings, and on to the "adult work" of full-blown sexual powers, we are taken by Mr. Kessler on a roller-coaster ride of emotions and intellect colliding, imploding and perhaps (for the reader) reconciling. By turns it is a novel bawdy, sensual, comedic, lonely, poetic, philosophical, but always touchingly poignant. It is as if Ted swims and simmers in a testosterone-boosted cauldron from which there is neither escape nor hope of answers - only questions and drives - and the strange meeting each day (and all his nights) with anguished fears and surprising joys brought by friends, family, lovers.

RAPID TRANSIT: 1948, An Unsentimental Education is not a philosophical essay variously expressed as a novel, but rather a challenging story of the everyday, told with vitality, through a search for poetry, and the interconnections of people struggling to fulfill themselves. After all, Ted's cerebral musings occur as our hero is desperately trying to get laid, get a job, and find a life. It is couched in a real Bronx neighborhood replete with delis, parks, bakeries and with specific odors of moldering apartments, lusty youths, and the new Bop sounds of Bud Powell and Max Roach at Manhattan's jazz clubs.

RAPID TRANSIT is peopled with some of the most idiosyncratic characters I have met in modern fiction. Besides Ted and his alter-ego, Leon, their buddies and lovers, there's a Runyanesque assortment of personalities: an ancient kosher slaughterer who spends his lonely days killing flies on a window sill with a slash of his ritual knife, Leon's dying father suffering in morphine-blurred agony, and Hanuschka, an Auschwitz survivor, who after experiencing truly absurd horror, is now beyond philosophy and seeks only an American normalcy.

The closing chapters, explosively hallucinatory, are as brilliantly written an exploration of Existential angst as any I have read, reminiscent of, who else but? Joyce's own Stephen Dedalus. Ted descends into his own Hades in a drug-induced state, and we follow him reluctantly into the surreal, fractured, and murderous night world where he almost loses himself. However, unlike the positive affirmation of life that is ULYSSES' mature denouement, RAPID TRANSIT leaves the reader with a sense of loneliness and tragic solitude in the deathly, impersonal universe that opened to our consciousness indelibly after 1945.

RAPID TRANSIT is probing serious fiction that both challenges as it delights. Mr. Kessler, an accomplished and noted poet and writer, clearly is a lover of our urban language. Though he pays homage by allusion to the like of Joyce and Eliot, he is clearly the master of his own luscious, incandescent prose and poetry. This author has created a genuine, if unusual masterpiece that deserves to be read for its skeptically contrary and disturbing view of our society 50 years ago, and its wide window on our world today, for its clearly delineated and idiosyncratic characters and setting, and for the sheer enjoyment of reading an author in full command of his language and his art.

I do not mean, by giving this book a poor rating, to dissuade anyone from reading Sophocles' greatest works. Rather, I would instead urge everyone to avoid the Slavitt & Bovie translations specifically. Examples of the excessive liberties that they have taken with other Attic dramas include inserting puns and one liners into the Chorus of Agamemnon, adding references to Black American hymns to the Chorus of the Libation Bearers, as well as many smaller, but still significant translation crimes. Get the Grene & Lattimore or almost any other version of these works, but do not get the Slavitt & Bovie