A debut novel about faith and desire falls short of its ambitious goals.
A trio of young Jews is caught in a web of desire in the years following World War II.
Sol Kerem, a rabbinical student in New York, is engaged to be married to the beautiful Rosalie when a mysterious German Jew named Walter Westhaus suddenly appears in his classes. After witnessing his own fiancee and his father shot down by Nazi soldiers, Walter escaped to an ashram in India, where he spent the remaining war years. Now in his mid-20s, Walter has been brought to New York by an academic who believes in his intellectual promise. Walter and Sol become study partners, and soon, Walter and Rosalie become partners in much more than study. Their affair spans decades. As Rosalie builds both a congregation and a family with Sol in New York, she continues to carry on with Walter, who has moved out to Berkeley. Gottlieb’s debut novel is an ambitious study of faith, doubt, and desire both erotic and spiritual. Unfortunately, the novel begins at an emotional pitch so high it can’t be sustained. Walter and Rosalie’s passion for each other begins to feel tiresome. Sol, who endures a spiritual crisis as well as this cuckolding, is a flat and pathetic character, mostly unrealized. For a book that takes intense emotion as its subject, it is peculiarly unfeeling. After all, what about Sol? The only thought that Walter and Rosalie give him is a sideways one: their affair, Rosalie thinks, is “possible and beautiful and wrong all at the same time.” That affair is described in purple, overheated prose that fails to comprehend the nuance of its own subject. The end result feels, peculiarly, both overblown and underarticulated.
A debut novel about faith and desire falls short of its ambitious goals.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-238336-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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