Second-novelist Schulman (Out of Time, 1991) offers a tragicomedy about a doctor whose marital problems trigger a radical reevaluation of his entire life. David Hershleder is a 39-year-old neurologist and son of a Holocaust survivor who’s going through a midlife crisis. His marriage is disintegrating. He finds it increasingly difficult to focus on his patients. He prefers to immerse himself in library research. He has the nagging feeling that he’s picking up all the habits he found off-putting about his father. In a strange and circuitous attempt to revive his marriage and rediscover himself, he becomes interested in tracking down and speaking to a onetime Holocaust denier who has recently published a massive tome (translated by an old schoolfriend of Hershleder’s) in which he reverses himself and declares the historical truth of the extermination of the Six Million. Accompanied by another old friend (who, like the translator, is also named David), Hershleder goes to Los Angeles and then to Paris to confront the apostate racist with the hope of discovering how it’s possible to turn one’s life completely around. On this slender and somewhat improbable thread, Schulman builds an intelligent, intermittently funny, but ultimately unsatisfying story whose major plot twists are too easily predictable. Although handled with seeming decency and taste, the Holocaust theme, juxtaposed with Hershleder’s more mundane problems, seems forced and almost exploitative. The novel veers between a Jewish take on the Cheever-Updike world of dysfunctional suburbia (including a trick chapter ending that echoes “The Swimmer”) and a vaguely Philip Rothian concern with the more unpleasant manifestations of the weakness of the flesh. Unfortunately, Schulman lacks the wry understatement of Cheever, the sheer word-drunkenness of Updike, and the overpowering brio of Roth. A minor addition to the fiction memorializing Jewish suburban-American angst.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-609-60208-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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