In his two collections of short stories [Going Places and I Would Have Saved Them if I Could], Leonard Michaels depicts the contemporary struggle to shape a sensibility sufficiently intelligent, flexible, detached, and controlled to negotiate the contemporary world. The characteristic setting for his stories is New York City—the modern urban landscape, violent, unpredictable, energetic, taxing—challenging and meaningful enough to be a "vale of soulmaking," dangerous and depersonalizing enough to be a hell. Michaels criticizes the modern tendency to perceive the problems of life in such an environment as intellectual puzzles, to be resolved by calling in reserves of greater and greater amounts of consciousness, but his criticism is not the silly, fashionable kind that derides all intellectual processes in the name of the emotional life betrayed. While some of his characters "suffer from too much consciousness … a sort of modern disease in which the operations...