The New York Times Book Review, Sunday 5/26/74 Love comes to Moe Gross Better Occasions By Eliot Wagner Reviewed by Hilton Kramer To that crowded roster of voluble Jewish characters that occupies so large a place in recent American fiction, providing it with some of its most hilarious and poignant moment, may now be added the unlikely figure of Mie Gross, the 57-year old house-painter from the Bronx who is the hero and narrator of Eliot Wagner's "Better Occasions." This is a short novel- barely more than a novella, really - that is at once a comedy and a love story. It even boasts a happy ending. But it is, despite some real belly laughs, a very dour comedy, pervaded by the presence of death. The very title of the book derives from this presence - "We should meet on better occasions" - for rarely have so many funerals and deathbed scenes been gathered into so short a narrative. Moe Gross's romance with the middle-aged widow, Ruth Amin, begins indeed on the brink of death - her attempted suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills, from which she is saved when he arrives on the morning of her 48th birthday to paint her apartment. From that opening scene is which slapstick and wisecracks are combined with a tender regard for common decencies, we are caught up in a rollicking tale, of love as strewn with obstacles and as filled with lyrical wonder as any story of tenn-age romance. We are caught up in a virtuosic use of language on which the Yiddish accented rhythms of the Bronx vernacular speech are compressed into a dazzling operatic idiom. The language is fast, broad and bitter, quick to seize on the worst that life can offer and even quicker to turn it into disabusing caricature and farce. This is how the novel begins: "What? Three flights up with the ladder and dropcloth, and nobody home? Heyyy, what's this one trying to pull with Moe Gross? "I glued my thumb to the doorbell - 'Painter!' - and hammered the door at one ant the same time. So what did I get? The neighbors. In his bathrobe an knock-knees Morning Mouth Krupnick, and Lady Krupnick plus two other pots with curlers and angry faces. "'What goes on here,' from Morning Mouth, ; at seven thirty A.M.?' "I gave him a look. "' You want peace and quiet? Go stick your head in the gas stove.; "Morning Mouth made a move and quick as a flash I pulled the plaster knife, shiny and sharp, out of the overall. "'Shall we dance?'" The other side of this sarcasm is a touching sweetness, and Mr. Wagner exercises a marvelous control over these abrupt shifts of feeling right down to the last and sweetest episode of the story. Gross announces his basic conviction about life to the half-conscious Mrs. Amin at the start: : Dead is a s sucker," and despite all the clowning and melodrama and squalid family scenes that their romance has to endure, it is precisely this sense of life claiming its rights in the face of death that makes this short novel so moving and so wise. Gross is a man almost (but not quite) buried in the disappointments of life, the prisoner of a mean-spirited existence from which the only hope of escape is money, which he never has enough of, or death, which is threatening to overtake him. Naturally, he is unhappily married (:So Madame Poison was home, the esteemed Mrs. Gross?...Would that be the Lady Tightass I've known and loved?"), with two daughters, one a fortune-hunting shark and the other a pushover for her sponging husband. In the near distance are the rich relations whose deaths might bring the bequests that would mean a release from the inevitable downward spiral. It is in this atmosphere of bleak family struggle and vulgar connivance as sordid as anything in Balzac, that Mr. Wagner sets his unusual love story. Moe Gross is an accomplished lecher with a low view of women, and he can scarcely believe that is happening when, for the first time in his life as a man, he finds himself falling in love. He resists it, mistakes it at first for the scenario of cynical appetite he knows only too well, and then accepts it as the miracle it is. It is all a wonderful story, and it is told with a humor that turns out to be a form of moral delicacy. What separates "Better Occasions" from a good deal of the fiction of Jewish life we are used to is the distance from the fantasy of psychoanalytical revenge. In reading this boo,, we do not feel that some private Freudian score is being evened. Some years ago, Mr. Wagner wrote an absorbing family chronicle about life in the Bronx, "Grand Concourse," which was distinguished for its sharp observation of a circumscribed milieu. In "Better Occasions," he has written both a deeper and a more entertaining novel without sacrificing either his detachment or his empathy.

Chicago Tribune Bookworld, Sept. 28, 1980 An Ethnic Novel filled with wonder and cheer My America! By Eliot Wagner Reviewed by Teresa Godwin Phelps Some books make you want to cheer, and Eliot Wagner's latest novel, "My America!" is one of them. Another book about Jewish immigrants and their descendants in New York City sounds about as undistinguished and ordinary as yesterday's chicken soup. Nonetheless, Eliot Wagner achiever in "My America?" a freshness and vitality that only a writer of uncommon talent can. Not only does he create characters that live long after you have finished the book, he risks pushing the possibilities of language and narrative style by telling the story itself with the speech patterns of the people he describes, the very intonation, rhythms, and dialects of his characters. Wagner writes with a poet's attention to the sounds, connotations, and patterns of words and dialog, and is no doing effectively draws the reader into the story and into the minds of the Shares and their assorted relatives. In "My America!" Wagner chronicles the lives of the philandering Hymie Share (a kind of Jewish-American Leopold Bloom), his long-suffering wife Golda, and their three children, Danny, Naomi, and Leah. Mixed into the Shares' lives are their saintly cousin Reisel and her paranoid mother Gittel, who have come to New York fleeing the revolutionaries in Russia: "Reds or Whites - who know which, and what was the difference?" The Shares and their relatives struggle to survive in Manhattan's Lower East Side during the early 1900's, and Wagner presents their unique griefs and joys with a commingling of poignancy and humor. The story focuses finally on Danny Share and his entrepreneurial wife Carrie. Tough Carrie, who grew up on a chicken farm in Orange, N.J., single-handedly parlays the Share family business, Quality Lamps, into a financial empire capable of buying up choice Manhattan property. The tension between the expedient and unscrupulous Carrie and her principled and idealistic husband provides much of the novel's energy. With Danny and Carrie, we fall in love and out again, we gain and lose money in the stock market during the heady and careening '20's, we survive the Crash, we watch with fear as Hitler - " That madman? He'll never last!" - gobbles up Europe, and we send sons off to war. With them we relive the history of the first half of this century, the events that inexorably determined today's attitude. Wagner never resorts to stock characters, banal dialog, of shopworn occurrences, and if we respond to this book and these characters as familiar, it is because the author captures some of the vital truth of life and experience. When this happens, reading becomes more than a passive act. Reading incorporates hearing, seeing, smelling, and feeling, and fiction achiever a rare veracity a palpability. These are the possibilities inherent in literature that George Steiner recognizes in "Language and Silence," when a book is written so that we as readers are compelled to "Engage the presence, the voice of the book" and "allow it entry, though not unguarded, into our inmost." This is high praise for any fiction writer, yet by mixing an unflinching perception of human psychology with a lyrical sense of dialog, Wagner frequently succeeds in "My America!" Moreover, "My America!" is a wonderful, exuberant book that crackles with humor and goodwill toward life. "My America!", Wagner's third novel (the other two: "Grand Concourse" and "Better Occasions") inaugurates the publishing list of Kenan Press, a new division of Simon & Schuster. After the cynical '70's, we can celebrate that the '80's commences with a novel full of energy, optimism, and hope. At the end of "My America!" Danny Share sits listening to a Mozart concert, and he thinks: "Now old Mozart twisted you around, turned you inside out, all but extinguished you.... and then left you smiling when he said goodbye. That was supposed to be a flaw.... Flaw my ass - that signoff said, "Mozart's the name!" Following his master Mozart, Wagner leads the reader through the kaleidoscopic changer in the Shares' lives, and concludes his story on a cheerful, upbeat note. Given the melancholy and pessimistic tone of so much contemporary fiction, we must ask: Flaw? No, just remember - Wagner's the name!