The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Amount to Carry, by Carter Scholz
reviewed by Daniel Garrett

Carter Scholz. The Amount to Carry. Picador, 2003. 208 pp. $23.00.

Carter Scholz’s The Amount to Carry contains twelve inventive stories that demonstrate the range and the limits of intelligence, as Scholz grounds his stories in math, science, and nature, with references as well to mythology, literature, and philosophy. The collection is epic in ambition and takes the reader from space stations and top-secret think tanks to boardinghouses, a country commune, sanitariums, artist studios, ancient caves, Kubla Khan’s China, Mengele’s South America, and Kafka’s Prague, while exploring layers of thought and reality. Yet some stories have a tedious, cold abstractness, focusing on only one or two extremely alienated characters, unbelievable situations, and obscure theories. Scholz also utilizes almost archaic English words such as “charnelhouse,” as well as lines from various languages—Latin, Dutch, Greek, German—that will keep some readers scrambling for several dictionaries. It is startling to see such sentences as the one that tells of a character’s use of an “ink compounded of his own blood and excrement” to write with a sharp tool on “his own body,” which would seem to promise infection, a short-lived medical calamity—and exemplify a surprisingly faulty dramatic reach. However, very strong stories are here, especially the ones that strategically begin and close the collection, among them “The Eve of the Last Apollo,” about an astronaut, his shallow public career, his unhappy marriage, and his wife’s leaving him for a commune’s leader; “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,” on the self-destructive late-life sexual awakening of an accountant; and “Mengele’s Jew,” which finds the Nazi war criminal imagining one last Jewish cage, a vision that calls forth moral judgment. (The last story involves Kafka, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Ives, and to say more would ruin a charming speculation.) Scholz’s admirable ambition seems to be to remap known and unknown worlds.