A companion piece to Roger's Version, this is Updike updating Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter by having Hester Prynne—here, Sarah Worth—get her two cents in as well. Sarah is a Boston-area matron who, as the book begins (which is all in letters from her, as well as the occasional transcript of a tape), has left her internist husband to travel out to Arizona and join the ashram of the Arhat, a multiple-Mercedes, owning guru absolutely patterned on the Rajneesh of Oregon fame. Sarah is no New Age twit, however, and her letters home, though filled with Sanskrit sublimities (Updike appends a 13-page glossary, assuming—as Updike will—that you'll be as interested in the specific informations of his fiction as he is), are also abrim with practical and very matronly advice to daughter, aged mother, and friends, mostly concerning money. For though the guru (who's later unmasked as Art Steinmetz from Watertown, Mass.) is a master-bilker himself, Sarah's no slouch and lands on her feet even after the veils of maya have been lifted from her eyes. Like Roger's Version and its computer-mainframe, Sarah's novel is one big trope, with a central (not extremely funny) joke (Arhat=Art) and reversal at the end. But it all seems too easy—as though Updike, like Graham Greene, now categorizes himself: a writer of novels (the Rabbit books) but also of more balsa-wood entertainments (as have been the last few books). Wit-soaked and completely au courant as these latter are (even the stock-market crash is prophesied here by Sarah's shrewd head for finance), they dissolve in the mind as soon as they're finished. Possible moral here: a rage for symmetry isn't always an artist's best friend.
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1988
ISBN: 0394568354
Page Count: 292
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1988
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
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
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