SOLOMON MOON

by William Darrid ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 30, 1984

The middle-aged identity crisis of an assimilated Sephardic Jew--who rediscovers his religious/ethnic identity in a long novel that's alternately engaging, pretentious, cutesy, and luridly melodramatic. Solomon Moon, head of the N.Y. story department for TransGlobal Films (Darrid held that position at Universal), is 50-ish and thoroughly discontented. He's forever compromising his artistic principles, knuckling under to the crass powers-that-be. Though he loves his English/gentile wife Kendal, he cheats on her with old flame Rena Nussbaum. He's utterly alienated by his daughter Darby's quest for her Jewish roots--which is abetted by Solomon's old chum Mousey Blum (an overdone cute/colorful type). And Solomon feels an unexplainable inner violence mounting--""a thing of a thousand feet, all clawed and tearing at the soft fibers of Solomon's belly and now ripping upwards inside his chest. . . ."" Soon, then, especially after the violent N.Y. death of his Jewish boss, Solomon is wrestling with his rage, with his ambivalence about Jewish past and identity. (""A Jew is getting your head blown off,"" he shouts at Darby.) Starving for a connection to some heritage, he at last starts to embrace Jewish rituals: ""'Tell me more, Mouse,' Solomon urged. 'Tell me everything!'"" Meanwhile, in Darrid's most ungainly plot-twist, the Vermont village where Solomon has a country-house is being terrorized by old religious/sexual psychopath Riordan Flynn--who just happens to be following the Jew-hating, Jew-torturing guidelines of the Spanish Inquisition! (Riordan and his son cover the Moon house in excrement and dismember the Moons' caretaker-among other stomach-turning crimes.) So finally, after Solomon takes a roots-trip to Spain and learns all about the Inquisition, he returns to rescue daughter Darby from the psycho-bigot up in Vermont. But, though tempted toward revenge, he refrains--having realized that ""A Jew is justice""--and instead runs toward ""his friends, his family, toward all men, and toward himself."" Darrid does well with some of the quieter moments here: the fond, funny Solomon/Kendal relationship, a few of the movie-biz sequences. He works hard at the novel's theological texture--giving Darby an ex-priest boyfriend in Vermont for comparative-religion discussions. Unfortunately, however, as in other recent chronicles of born-again-Jewishness (Sara Davidson's Friends of the Opposite Sex, etc.), Solomon's central soul-journey seems glib and simplistic. And the Inquisition-in Vermont subplot--with gratuitous kinky/gore detail--sensationalizes the religious/ethnic theme in a variety of distasteful ways. Too earnest for horror-melodrama entertainment, too crude for serious readers: a not-untalented, largely misguided mishmash.

Pub Date: May 30, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Villard/Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984

Categories: FICTION