Leonard Michaels is what they call “a writers’ writer”, by which I mean that I only know of two other people who’ve read him, both of them fellow authors, and one of them only because I pressed a copy of Michaels’s Nachman Stories into his hands myself. Like Malamud’s Fidelman, Nachman is a character who recurs in multiple stories – a somewhat unworldly academic whom his creator drops into a succession of ethical and moral dilemmas to see what happens. Despite his insistence that he wants nothing more than to “do mathematics”, “problems so difficult that [he] sometimes cried”, Nachman is just as capable of significant moral equivocation as those around him, of allowing himself to be manipulated, and of tying himself in entertainingly hypocritical knots. In ‘Nachman from Los Angeles’ the mathematician recalls a time two decades earlier when he was prevailed upon to write a college paper on Bergsonian metaphysics – not his forte – for Prince Ali Massid, a very wealthy, very charming overseas student who is not merely handsome, Nachman notices, but “perfect”. Despite recognising that it is not “strictly correct to write a paper for someone else”, Nachman collects the books he’ll need, begins the required reading, even comes to enjoy the unfamiliar material – and then stalls. As the deadline approaches, Ali showers the mathematicians with gifts, bribes, beseeches him, sends his cheerleader girlfriend to Nachman’s apartment in a wretched attempt at entrapment – but Nachman is stuck because he has put himself in the impossible position of contravening a moral code he only tells himself he possesses. He cannot write the paper and compromise himself; nor can he definitively back out of the agreement he made with Ali and show himself to be dishonourable. What to do? To write the paper or not? Twenty years on, he is still turning the question over in his mind.
First published in The New Yorker, January 2001 and available to read here; collected in The Collected Stories, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007 and The Nachman Stories, Daunt Books, 2017
A Personal Anthology 