The key events in [Leonard Michaels' first collection of short stories, Going Places]—usually holocausts in the lives of his Leonard Michaels 1933– © Jerry Bauerprotagonists—are indistinguishable from the settings in which they occur. Settings are felt to be a physical extension of the agonized victims who inhabit them. I am constantly reminded by Michaels' emblematic stage sets that no other time and no other place could have fostered precisely the form or quality of torture that strikes the persona dumb, dead, or fiercely awake—excruciatingly alive for the first time…. These are not simply locales, settings—traditional background—ever. Life does not merely occur in these machines, edifices; life transfigures the forms that enshrine its daily happening, the forms merging with the bodies they enclose, altering and entering into their life stream.

In "Going Places," the title story, Michaels realizes a totally plastic, epidermal style. Every sentence...