Imaginative, intelligent, cluttered, long on black humor, and just long.
In a near future fraught with violent anti-Semitism, a family Passover focuses on patricide.
Julian Jacobson is surely among the worst fathers in literary history, raising his children with vitriol, shame, and aggression, treating their mother no better. He tried to poison his adoring daughter by giving her food she was allergic to and relentlessly abused his sons in truly evil ways. Somehow the kids got through it, damaged as they may be. Each gets a chunk of this book devoted to his or her perspective; a penultimate chapter full of twists and revelations lets us into their mother’s head. Moses, the oldest, is an actor with a reality show called The JacobSONS! about his life with wife Pandora and their triplets and twins, all boys. Edith is a promiscuous and unhappy professor of ethics at Emory, currently up on charges of sexual harassment. At 38, Jacob is the youngest and arguably the most alienated. He lives in Berlin with a German boyfriend named Dietrich and has documented the family nightmare in childhood journals he calls My Manifest of Meanness and later in his plays, the first of which shares the title of this novel. When the siblings learn their mother has lung cancer and has only a short time to live, they are certain their father is making her last months on Earth miserable and could even be intentionally hastening her death, since he’s been after her money all along. Though they sort of hate each other, the three plan a family get-together at Moses’ house in Los Angeles—nominally for Passover, but actually to kill their dad, which is going to be tricky since Seder at The JacobSONS! will be broadcast live. In Levinson’s (Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, 2013) dystopian 2022, the state of Israel is no more, having been carved up by Syria, Iran, and Lebanon after a war during which the United States stood aside. Now 4 million refugees have relocated to the U.S., provoking an intense xenophobic reaction and constant domestic terrorism. There’s a lot to admire here, and a bit to be annoyed with, too—Levinson is a habitual overexplainer and loves nothing like a good back story.
Imaginative, intelligent, cluttered, long on black humor, and just long.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49688-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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