An ethnic novel with universal implications.
Yes, this is indeed a novel about a frozen rabbi who thaws in the late 20th century after being found by Bernie Karp, of Memphis, Tenn., in his parents’ freezer.
Stern (The Angel of Forgetfulness, 2005, etc.) uses his absurdist fantasy to explore issues of faith, secularism and redemption. Bernie, in particular, is in need of the latter, for he’s a 15-year-old couch potato with no interest in or regard for his religious heritage. While the novel starts with the recovery of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr from the deep freeze (Bernie’s father explains to his bewildered son that “they handed [the rabbi] down from generation to generation”), Stern alternates chapters chronologically, beginning in 1889 when the rabbi, a noted holy man in Tsarist Russia, would meditate by a pond in order to get closer to God. One day a storm came, the water rose, the rabbi continued to meditate and winter eventually arrived, resulting in his being encased in ice. From that point we trace both the history of the Karp family’s interaction with the frozen rabbi (in the early 20th century it helped that an earlier Karp had owned a large ice factory) and Bernie’s spiritual transformation as a result of his interactions with the Chasidic sage. Bernie begins to lose weight, to have out-of-body experiences and to become intellectually invested in obscure Jewish mystical texts. Meanwhile, the rabbi becomes fascinated with and impressed by life around the year 2000: “Shopping bazaars it’s got, and Dodge Barracudos and Gootchie bags made I think from the skin of Leviathan…but it ain’t got a soul.” The rabbi makes a radical attempt to ingest soul into this culture by establishing a “House of Enlightenment” in a strip mall in Memphis. As Bernie’s fortunes begin to rise—he even acquires a “trailer trashy” girlfriend sympathetic to his needs—so do the rabbi’s decline, resulting in a tragicomic conclusion.
An ethnic novel with universal implications.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56512-619-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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