This novel has good bones obscured by too much flab.
A father fights genocide on the world stage while neglecting the domestic front.
Lerner’s debut novel has a nonlinear structure: It jumps around in time, from the years immediately following World War II, to the 1960s, ’70s and late ’90s. Three narrators alternate: Jacob, an American-born Jew who was part of the Allied liberation force in Europe; his now-estranged wife, Susanna, a renowned anthropologist who has recently been diagnosed with malignant melanoma; and their son, Shalom, who, much to Susanna’s disappointment, foreswore anthropology to manage rock bands. After Germany’s surrender, Jacob is forever marked by what he has learned of Nazi crimes and by his failure to protect an Auschwitz survivor, Judith. His motto becomes “Never again” as he dedicates himself to the creation of the Jewish homeland in Israel and, whenever summoned by a mysterious operative named Salik, goes off on secret missions to help populations threatened by genocide. At a Hannah Arendt lecture, he meets Susanna, whose entire family perished in the Shoah. (She escaped Poland aboard a Kindertransport plane). Susanna has become disenchanted with her husband’s frequent and unpredictable absences, and the decisive rupture occurs when his efforts on behalf of Homo sapiens interfere with her search for fossilized hominids. (On his rare returns, Jacob is not far away: He has been banished only to the basement of Susanna’s Brooklyn brownstone.) When Shalom—whose comparatively trivial pursuits (promoting an African salsa band, clubbing and dating another failed anthropologist) hardly justify his status as a third narrator—informs him of Susanna’s illness, Jacob deploys his considerable martial skills against an enemy that just may be invincible. Only one of Jacob’s missions (in the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan massacres) is described in any detail, and even then his role seems peripheral and nebulous—the most riveting drama plays out much closer to home.
This novel has good bones obscured by too much flab.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-620-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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
PERSPECTIVES
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SEEN & HEARD
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