The author amply demonstrates that she has inherited her father’s unblinking moral scrutiny and sympathy for the yearning...
Candid yet sensitive, this memoir by clinical social worker Smith (A Potent Spell, 2003, etc.) exquisitely captures “the particular psychic pleasure and confusion” of being the daughter of novelist/short-story writer Bernard Malamud.
Amusing, hardworking and decent, Malamud (1914–86) was also burdened by early poverty and an unhappy childhood. His father, an unsuccessful Brooklyn grocer, was the model for long-suffering Morris Bober in The Assistant; mental illness plagued both his mother and brother. While summoning all his ability and strength for writing, Malamud expected similar devotion to his needs from wife Ann and their two children. Smith rejoiced in her father’s presence as a girl, but as an adolescent and adult, she “found his need for me oppressive, felt angry at his oversize, insistent presence.” Complicating matters was Malamud’s midlife affair with one of his Bennington College students, which sparked retaliatory flings by Ann and Janna (the latter, fittingly, with a married high-school teacher roughly her father’s age). The novelist’s daughter also silently seethed over the peculiar ways incidents in her life served as fodder for his late-career novel, Dubin’s Lives. Nevertheless, the portrait here reveals mutual affection and commitment that, while strained, never broke. Smith’s recollections of her father’s contemporaries—Lillian Hellman, Howard Nemerov, Philip Roth, C.P. Snow and Shirley Jackson—are consistently trenchant. Even more memorable are passages from Malamud’s own journals and letters, which sometimes unfold in a wry and chatty voice but more often are ruminative. (On his parents’ influence, he writes, “I think I translated their endurance into my discipline.”) Above all, Smith enhances our understanding of how the larger themes of Malamud’s fiction mirror his concern with imperfect people balancing moral responsibility against the desire to transcend pitiless circumstance.
The author amply demonstrates that she has inherited her father’s unblinking moral scrutiny and sympathy for the yearning heart.Pub Date: March 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-69166-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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