Ely Cutter, the central figure of Miriam N. Kotzin’s often hilarious suburban dramedy, Right This Way, tells us that he doesn’t “know women.” And is he ever right. Kotzin, who teaches literature and writing at Drexel University and has published widely in fiction and poetry, creates a superb comedy of errors that plumbs what forever eludes us in our search for good lives.
Educated, experienced, aware, Ely nevertheless can’t actually hear women. He does listen, but always through the bent ear-trumpet of his interests, desires, and self-delusions. He seldom replies with the straight truth because he’s afraid it will anger people, cause further problems, or make him look bad. His agile mind is constantly ticking over, straining to interpret and anticipate. He drives to meet Grace, a customer (Ely is in real estate) he knows is an admirer. Her every sentence is a double entendre, including “I think I’ll go freshen up.” Tick tick tick goes Ely’s mind:
Freshen up could mean anything from a total makeover—shower, change of outfit, hair style, new makeup – to a euphemism for a quick potty stop. He couldn’t ask or even argue. It would be indelicate. He wanted to say, “You look fine, lovely.” She did look fine, and “lovely” didn’t begin to capture her spirit or style.
Not a drop of shade in the driveway. Hot as hell. Might as well be practical. It would be nice and cool inside. Besides, nothing can go wrong, not like yesterday. He’d just make sure his feet were on the ground and that he kept his center of gravity low. Or at least, that he maintained his balance.
He followed Grace into the kitchen.
“Get the heck out of there!” cries the chuckling reader as Ely talks himself into making exactly the wrong move.
At their Cherry Hill, NJ, home, Ely brings morning coffee upstairs and discovers Lynne, his wife, on the phone, talking and laughing about him and his duplicities:
If he listened to Lynn’s conversation, he felt like an intruder, and, even worse, when she was in a bad mood, she’d glare at him, a look that said, “Get out of here and give me some privacy.” Even when that hadn’t happened, if he chanced afterwards to comment on the conversation, she was often snippy about his having listened in. Sometimes, however, he’d be in the room, paying no attention to Lynne’s conversation, and when she hung up, she’d ask him a question about something she’d said on the phone. Then, when he was at a loss, she’d be annoyed at that. How could he have not heard what she was saying? When he’d reply, explaining that he hadn’t been listening, she’d be cross either because she had to repeat what she’d said or because she thought he’d failed to show sufficient interest. He never knew which situation it would be.
What a careful, precise, detailed account of the crazy, thorny, jungle-viney tangle of human dealings. Kotzin’s wise, surprising writing is always in control, even at its zaniest. Narration crackles alongside crisp dialogue.
Some of her best moments concern the Cutter backyard garden. We oscillate between the house, shady with ambiguities and disconnects, and the sun-splashed garden full of tomatoes. Even the weeds in the lawn are healthy and vigorous. Ely falls asleep on a deck chair and sleeps all night outside. When he awakes:
the sun had risen just high enough over the roof to light a corner of the garden. He’d never awakened outside before; even in the scouts he’d slept in a pup tent. He’d crawled out and been astonished by the dew, by how wet the world could be even without rain. Now he was amazed by the beauty of the garden, the shades of green, and, where the sun served as spotlight, the gaudy marigolds and zinnias, pink, yellow, orange, and red. He was content here, fortunate to breathe the morning air and to be, as he so often said, on the right side of the grass.
In this comedy of anxious, little deceits, we have a rare moment of unguarded bliss in a garden of which we’re always in the midst, despite our suburban walls and windows. This is a nature that gestures to its own meanings, with a spotlight sun and a sunlit Deity that appear to gesture: right this way.
But we often aren’t right this way. To give him his due, Ely is a handful, and women constantly are trying to figure him out. (“It makes me feel like I’m at a tennis match trying to talk to you,” says Lynne.) One of the many pleasures of this book is the grand circling of understandings—Eli around women, women around Eli, trying to get at the center. Around this orbits the world of gossip and sharing: everything he does gets told to someone immediately, who passes it along immediately, creating a universe where all he does is constantly shared in public, masticated, and scatter-shot, just for it to get blasted back in his face before he’s ready.
Which he never is. He’s constantly trying to get ready, to anticipate how women—Lynne; Eleanor, a former dalliance; Grace; and also Joanne, who messes up Ely’s life but good with her reports of his activities—will react when they hear about X or Y. The inevitability of gossip, and its way of hovering beyond him, is nowhere clearer, or funnier, than with the encounter that begins the novel: Ely’s vision of God in the sky. Is it an omen? A warning to wayward husband Ely to mend his ways? A stroke? And what does Ely think it means? Everyone really wants to know. (He seems to take it seriously: he even returns to a long-neglected habit of saying the ancient Jewish prayers before eating.)
Most moralities or ethics ask us to be responsible for the things we do, sure, but there’s more: mercy, empathy, a willingness to be helpful, to hear without judgment, to avoid the hurtful quip, the murderous exit, the easy omission worse than commission—all of which befalls Ely and others in Right This Way. Joanne barges into a mishap she misinterprets and blabs all over Cherry Hill. A misplaced phone call somehow lands on Ely and Lynne’s phone, stirring up awful echoes. A ring lies unknown in the midst of that vivid garden, just one more thing to mess up and be messed up by.
Which leads us to the tragicomic and mystical poise of this novel. We cannot catch up all our consequences. Even if we could see the future, it still would outstrip our best efforts to avoid or improve it. Ely is largely but not totally to blame; he’s just caught up in the oblique and necessary accountability built into human life. If Ely really could hear women, maybe he’d be better off, but he’s Ely, and he can’t and isn’t. Cheers to Miriam N. Kotzin for a memorable experience, a bucket of laughs, and a persuasive portrait of the human world.
Miriam N. Kotzin’s new novel, Right This Way, can be purchased online from Amazon here.
Right This Way
By Miriam N. Kotzin
Spuyten Duyvil Press
Published on January 23, 2023
339 pages
John Timpane, the former Books Editor and Theater Critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is a retired English teacher and journalist living and working in New Jersey. His work has appeared in Sequoia, North of Oxford, Apiary, Painted Bride Quarterly, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Per Contra, Vocabula Review, Truthdig, and elsewhere. His latest book, a chapbook, is Buck in the Piano Room (Philadelphia: Moonstone Press).