Sharply observed but perhaps a bit too sprawling, Foer's novel bites off more than it can chew.
Foer’s (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 2005, etc.) first novel in 11 years aspires to be a contemporary Jewish epic.
The book is not unlike a Jonathan Franzen novel crossed with one by Philip Roth. Like Franzen, Foer details the disintegration of an American family against the backdrop of a larger social breakdown—a 7.6 earthquake, epicentered beneath the Dead Sea, that devastates both Israel and the Middle East. Like Roth, he investigates a basic question: what does it mean to be a Jew? That all of this is more complicated than it appears is the point of the sprawling novel, which showcases Foer’s emotional dexterity even as it takes place across a wider canvas than his previous books. Beginning just before the bar mitzvah of Sam Bloch, a precocious if disconnected 13-year-old, Foer traces a well of family trouble (dying elders, dying pets, the relentless testing of all boundaries), culminating in the separation of Sam’s parents, Jacob and Julia. Jacob is a TV writer and Julia is an architect, and their relationship has withered beneath the onslaught of their responsibilities. “She needed a day off,” Foer writes of Julia. “She would have loved the feeling of not knowing how to fill the time, of wandering without a destination in Rock Creek Park, of actually savoring a meal of the kind of food that her kids would never tolerate.” This is great stuff, written with the insight of someone who has navigated the crucible of family, who understands how small slights lead to crises, the irreconcilability of love. Where the novel runs into trouble, however, is in widening its lens to the geopolitical after the earthquake, as the Arab states unite against Israel and the Israeli prime minister calls on all Jewish men to come home. It’s not that the conflict isn’t potent or that Foer doesn’t understand its awful ironies; “There was absolutely nothing,” he observes about the Iranian ayatollah, “to distinguish his face from that of a Jew.” Still the tension is diffused by two concluding sections that take place well after the main part of the action, undermining the sense of impending apocalypse on which the novel relies. In the end, we are left to wonder what the stakes are—or more accurately, where the real connections reside. “What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?” asks the rabbi at Jacob’s grandfather’s funeral. The answer—“Maybe like laughing”—is both fulfilling and unfulfilling, much like this ambitious, if not entirely satisfying, book.
Sharply observed but perhaps a bit too sprawling, Foer's novel bites off more than it can chew.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-28002-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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