Ilka Weissnix is a twenty one year old immigrant from Vienna. Arriving in New York City for the very first time, she is hungry to learn everything she can about America. Her cousin, Litvak, arranges for her to travel cross country by train to the wild, wild west. It's in Nevada where Ilka meets her "first American", Carter Bayoux. This is the 1950s so meeting Carter is blessing and a curse. Being an intellectual he is eager to show Ilka the world of artists and scholars. Being a heavy drinker and a reckless romantic he also exposes her to jokes that aren't always funny and a world that sometimes is unfair and unpredictable. Needless to say she is confused a lot of the time. But, it's his drinking that really hit home for me. I live on the fringe of other people's addiction and Segal does an amazing job bringing that harsh reality into the spotlight with subtle grace. Carter's bouts of loneliness and helplessness are amplified through his constant summoning of Ilka to his hotel room as if there is a dire emergency. His brother's inability to be around him is an indication of the shame Carter has brought to his family. And yet, Carter is surrounded by friends who obviously adore him.

I found this to be a fascinating read. At times I caught myself pondering American slang and thinking how strange it must sound in the ears of a foreigner.
As an aside, I have no idea why Lore wanted Ilka to travel all the way to Nevada to meet Carter. They both live in New York City so wouldn't it have been easier to have them bump into each other there? The trip out west is just an odd blip in an otherwise mostly New York-centric story. ( )

1985. Great book. Ilka Weisznix, a Jewish emigre from Vienna, whose Father died in WWII, has moved to New York. She meets Carter Bayoux, her first American, in a whistlestop bar in Nevada. He is light-skinned and it takes her a while to realize that he's black, or a negro as they said in the 50s, when the book takes place. Bayoux is an educated, intellectual and a journalist, interested in international politics. He writes about the UN for the Harlem Journal, but has fallen on hard times because of his rampant alcoholism. He teaches Ilka a lot about American life at a time when she's just learning English and struggling to understand the world around her. His retinue of intellectual friends, mostly blacks and Jews, confuses Ilka. They become lovers despite a significant age difference and the fact that they both know it will end badly. Segal's writing brings ordinary people and incidents to brilliant life and makes extraordinary events seem almost ordinary, because they happen in ordinary time to ordinary people who usually only have an inkling at most of their extraordinariness while they're happening. Ilka wonders how people ever come to get their clothes off and make love, then she asks Carter and he says he always wonders how that's going to happen too. Segal's acute observation of the human animal had me recognizing myself and my fellow creatures on practically every page in ways I had never thought of before, or ways which I thought no one else, but me had ever thought of before, which is the essence of great literature: to find yourself recognized and therefore not alone. Also the recognition of the humanity of her characters is done which such grace that none seem better or worse than each other. In the end all are equally wonderful and equally flawed, which seems in itself to be another universal truth. If only we could all always see it as clearly as Lore Segal. ( )