The Wherewithal by Philip Schultz

Henryk Wyrzykowski, 'Head Clerk of Closed Files' at a San Francisco welfare office, is translating his mother's diaries while evading the Vietnam War. An account of the Jedwabne massacre told by a woman lost in Alzheimer's, the diary entries are elliptical, febrile and unreliable. So too is Henryk's free-verse narration, as he examines his own life, whether in Nazi-occupied Poland or late sixties hippy-comedown America.

The overlapping narratives work surprisingly well together, and Schultz has a knack for forceful, glass-clear imagery. Treblinka was 'a one-way road to eternity', where prisoners 'covered with sand / the bodypits which turned red in the morning light ... Once or twice / a hand twitched on the surface'. Occasionally, though, he slackens into cliché ('snug as a bug', 'bursting at its seams') or panting periphrasis (welfare claimants are 'Angst-ridden, befuddled / each a decapitated fugue, / a broken contract, / an inventory of neglect, / an invisible witness, / a peculiar hiccup, an out-of-sync / factory of relentless complaint').

'A Novel in Verse', The Wherewithal suffers from the usual problems of this en vogue form. Lacking the range and human depth of the novel, and the tight, rooted, richly ambiguous verbal texture of poetry, it ends up a slightly weak mixture of both.