Yes, Potok (In The Beginning, The Chosen) is once again following a young Jewish protagonist on a journey that ends, somewhat too perfunctorily, with a reaffirmation of Faith. But this time the doubts along the way are so textured, so centrally disturbing, that this flawed, richly challenging novel (perhaps too challenging for some of Potok's usual audience) offers considerably more to the non-believer than Potok's previous fiction. The quiet, questing hero here is Gershon Loran, "a scared twentieth-century Jew with visions." His parents were killed in a riot while on a 1930s landbuying trip to Israel; he's grown up in Brooklyn with his uncle and aunt, fragile beings shattered by their son's WW II death. So by now, circa 1950, Gershon has turned inward, away from the horror—to the study of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism); at a N.Y. seminary he becomes the protege of a great Kabbalist, spurning an equally great sage of Talmud (a more worldly, law-oriented field of study). But Gershon's roommate at the seminary turns out to be a boozy embodiment of the horrors from which Gershon is fleeing: he is Arthur Leiden, the handsome, joking, guilt-wracked son of a key A-bomb physicist. And after Gershon has spent a year as a chaplain in postwar Korea (functioning well in the real world but riveted by memories and visions), Arthur turns up there too, obsessively determined to visit Japan. Hiroshima, of course, is the destination—and Arthur says Kaddish at the monument there. But for Gersbon there is also the unsettling impact of the vast alien Orient, seemingiy outside the "world" of the Old Testament: "He was being taught the loveliness of God's world by a pagan land." So finally, after Arthur's plane-crash death—headed for yet one more Japan pilgrimage—Gershon's visions and voices debate the right response of a new generation to "the shards left by the giants." This finale, with Gershon repeating the Kaddish and returning to the Kabbalah, seems oddly evasive. And, throughout, Potok slips into platitudes, with some ponderous stretches. But the novel is tremendously shapely, stately in pace yet dramatic and vivid in its canny storytelling. And, though occasionally overdone, the, haunting interplay of "light" imagery (from Kabbalah legend to Hiroshima's "death-light" to the fluorescents in a delicatessen) reflects a fundamental spiritual questioning that goes beyond secular concern. A dark tapestry of a book, then, more suggestive than powerful, with threads that may reach out and hold a surprising range of readers.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1981
ISBN: 0449001148
Page Count: 389
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1981
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a...
A brilliantly constructed first novel that untangles an intricate web of sexual and caste conflict in a vivid style reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's early work.
The major characters are Estha and Rahel, the fraternal twin son and daughter of a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala. The family's prosperity is derived from a pickle factory and rubber estate, and their prideful Anglophilia essentially estranges them from their country's drift toward Communism and their ``inferiors' '' hunger for independence and equality. The events of a crucial December day in 1969—including an accidental death that may have been no accident and the violent consequences that afflict an illicit couple who have broken "the Love Law''—are the moral and narrative center around which the episodes of the novel repeatedly circle. Shifting backward and forward in time with effortless grace, Roy fashions a compelling nexus of personalities that influence the twins' "eerie stealth'' and furtive interdependence. These include their beautiful and mysteriously remote mother Ammu; her battling "Mammachi'' (who runs the pickle factory) and "Pappachi'' (an insufficiently renowned entomologist); their Oxford-educated Marxist Uncle Chacko and their wily "grandaunt'' Baby Kochamma; and the volatile laborite "Untouchable'' Velutha, whose relationship with the twins' family will prove his undoing. Roy conveys their explosive commingling in a vigorous prose dominated by odd syntactical and verbal combinations and coinages (a bad dream experience during midday nap-time is an "aftermare'') reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins's "sprung rhythm,'' incantatory repetitions, striking metaphors (Velutha is seen ``standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body'') and sensuous descriptive passages (``The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud'').
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a novel, and a truly spectacular debut. (First serial to Granta)Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45731-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured...
Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff.
It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” to Lilly’s niece and ward Maude, a “simple, natural” innocent who will be married off to “Mr. Rivers,” then disposed of in a madhouse, while the conspirators share her wealth. Maidservant and mistress grow unexpectedly close, until Gentleman’s real plan—a surprise no reader will see coming—leads to a retelling of events we’ve just witnessed, from a second viewpoint—which reveals the truth about Mr. Lilly’s bibliomania, and discloses to a second heroine that “Your life was not the life that you were meant to live.” (Misdirections and reversals are essential components of Waters’s brilliant plot, which must not be given away.) Further intrigues, escapes, and revelations climax when Susan (who has resumed her place as narrator) returns from her bizarre ordeal to Mrs. Sucksby’s welcoming den of iniquity, and a final twist of the knife precipitates another crime and its punishment, astonishing discoveries about both Maude and Susan (among others), and a muted reconciliation scene that ingeniously reshapes the conclusion of Dickens’s Great Expectations.
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured period detail. This is a marvelous novel.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-203-8
Page Count: 493
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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