Herb's Pajamas
A less commercial book thanHerb's Pajamasis difficult to imagine. Part novel, part collection of interlinked stories, it follows four New Yorkers living lives of quiet desperation on a single square block of Manhattan's Upper West Side. In the first and perhaps most fully realized section, a mild-mannered copyeditor both mourns and fails to understand his much-loved wife's departure. Cleverly divided into tiny vignettes entitled "Hat," "Gloves," and so on, "Edith's Wardrobe" follows a "trembly maiden of 52" as she daydreams her way through the aftermath of her mother's death. In the third section, a 14-year-old runs away from home to search for her missing sister, while the aging narrator of the brief title story finds her married lover dead on the fire escape and must decide what to do with his body.Rather than bring these lonely people together in a more conventionally novelistic way, Thomas instead allows them to brush by each other in the street without ever noticing, much as they might in real life. Thomas's characters haunt the same bookstores, the same neighborhood cafés, and the reader experiences the thrill of recognition when their paths cross. (Is that Walter we spot in the movie theater lobby? Is the "woman in the green shawl" the bookstore owner, and has he finally asked her out?) The choice is both daring and apt. As much as these characters want to connect to the world around them, their inability to do so is precisely the point of this slender, quietly witty book.