A charming take on the 'two strangers meet and fall in love over one glance' theme, cleverly written in Raymond Federman's metafictional style, which is well suited to dangle readers over the tantalizing cliff of will this work out or not, will these two people meet again, and if they do, will they fall in love, and if they do that, will it last, or perhaps...was it all imagined. Regardless of how the reader chooses to interpret this story, Federman's prose feels very sincere, even in his mockery. There is no pretension in his writing. It is instead imbued with a pleasant warmth of humanness, which is not what one typically expects to find in postmodern fiction. A fine little novel by a writer (still) deserving of a wider readership. ( )

Finding any book by Raymond Federman either new or used at any bricks-and-mortar bookseller in the United States is next to impossible. Not so in Europe, and especially France, where Federman was born in 1928, and where also, like John Hawkes before him, he has become nearly as large a literary legend as Victor Hugo. Well, almost.

I searched for anything by Federman for six years (I loathe the thought of ordering books online -- especially from Amazon -- without seeing and feeling and even sniffing out what condition they're in -- a phobia, I realize), without success. But then one lucky evening at the Bookman in Orange, CA, this slender volume, Smiles on Washington Square (A Love Story of Sorts) published by Sun and Moon press, materialized like a dream in mint condition (had it even been read? opened?) before me.

I think like most U.S. citizens (excluding fusty and fastidious English professors), I'd never heard of Raymond Federman until happening upon Larry McAfferey's "20th Century Greatest Hits," a fascinating Top 100 list focused on English language novels and dominated primarily by postmodern, experimental works. Federman's 1976 novel, Take It Or Leave it, ranks 11th on the list, one spot behind Finnegans Wake; while 1971s, Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse (Federman's first English novel) places 46th.

Smiles on Washington Square (A Love Story of Sorts), from 1985, didn't make the list, though it was awarded The American Book Award by The Before Columbus Foundation. Federman has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship (among many other professional awards) and published four books of essential, highly regarded criticism on Samuel Beckett (one of Federman's mentors) as well as producing five volumes of poetry and numerous plays. And yet , going on its fifth decade-in-a-row now, the ignoramuses that make up the 99.9% of the U.S. reading public have all but completely ignored this innovative writer. Mystifying. He's 80 now, one of the last living first wave of postmodernists, retired from teaching but not from writing, never from writing, living in San Diego, and has been kind enough to respond to my couple of wordy and nerdy emails. So how could I not, in just this dinky way here, repay him the kindness and promote his body of neglected books?

Smiles on Washington Square (A Love Story of Sorts) centers on the characters, Moinous and Sucette, who both may be merely the product of one another's imaginations. But which character is real and which imaginary, one must read to the very end to find out. To know at least for sure. I was convinced three-quarters of the way through (and my initial impression may in fact still be correct, for the ending's gorgeously ambiguous) that Moinous was a character in a short story that Sucette was writing for school. A love story of sorts, from Federman's title, about a young man and woman who meet (or, rather, smile) at one another in Washington Square. But keeping in mind Moinous' cultural isolation (he's fresh from France, a stranger to New York, like Federman once was) and his poverty (he becomes homeless and sleeps on a wood bench at the train station), and that he has extreme difficulty procuring and maintaining employment, even as a dishwasher ... while Sucette, at least Sucette's involvement in the love story we read about, might be a mirage imagined by Moinous' lonely, isolated mind. He's sees this beautiful woman, Sucette, smile at him in Washington Square, at an anti-McCarthy rally which turns violent, a rally where a politically clueless Moinous, in fact, gets batoned and beaten by the police, but thankfully, Sucette is there (or is she?) to help him to her apartment, bandage his wounds, offering him tea and talk -- they talk for hours -- though a long (for Moinous) forty-two days will transpire before their simple tea and talk becomes passionate consummation, that is, if you believe Moinous' imagination, and his unending complaints, why oh why is she making me wait this long?

The novel circulates between Moinous' lonely longings for companionship and Sucette's writing of her short story, the two narratives intertwined but only intersecting at those smiles on Washington Square. Does a relationship between the two exist beyond those ephemeral smiles? Not to spoil the outcome, since only eight other LTers have this compassionate, convoluted but not confusing examination of people's loneliness and sad isolations in their collections, so I seriously doubt I'm spoiling anything for much of anybody, but to answer the previous question -- is there a relationship between Moinous and Sucette beyond their smiles in Washington Square -- I doubt it. What happens during the narrative, you could say, never happens. Being either Moinous' fantasies, or Sucette's fiction.

Are your daydreams (mine?) of finding that lovely person whom you'll love and whom will also love you in return, and in this mysterious reciprocal exchange of love, ease the heart's pangs of loneliness and longing for human connection, intimacy, and belonging -- are these daily daydreams one often experiences and yearns for anymore real -- real in an actualized sense that what you're daydreaming about is truly occuring -- than a love story in a work of fiction? Of course I think that's Federman's entire point: how our disconnectedness results in fantasies which often only then further exacerbate our disconnectedness and loneliness and rob us of the potential friends or lovers staring us in the face. Why didn't Moinous (assuming he didn't and that I've interpreted Federman's book of 148 pages correctly) do more than smile at Sucette? Was he too shy just to walk over to her and say hi? Why did he prefer his fantasy "relationship" with Sucette instead of making something actual happen between them--and vice versa? Sucette, apparently, lives in her own fiction world of storywriting, but is she content in her loneliness and isolation, or does perhaps creating a "reality" on paper of a love story of sorts, somehow make her loneliness less real? Is that why she writes--to apply a balm of fantasy to her isolated reality?

Thought provoking work, Smiles on Washington Square (A Love Story of Sorts). I'm pretty positive I won't be searching for another six years for another of Raymond Federman's evocative books. In fact, after I finish this sentence, I'm ordering both Take It Or Leave It and Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse online. But not from Amazon. Good idea if others did the same. ( )