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THE UNTHINKABLE THOUGHTS OF JACOB GREEN

Name: THE UNTHINKABLE THOUGHTS OF JACOB GREEN
Author: Joshua Braff
ISBN: 1-56512-420-0

by Joshua Braff ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2004

Compulsively readable, in a horrifying sort of way. What will Braff do next now that he’s got that off his chest?

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Scarifyingly funny debut limns a suburban boy's struggle to cope with the Jewish Father from Hell.

The ghastly housewarming party he throws when they move to Piedmont, New Jersey, in 1977 tells us almost everything we need to know about Abe Green in the nine opening pages. He’s overbearing, he’s needy, and he flashes his family's accomplishments as if they were credentials. (Jacob “reads Hebrew so beautifully it'll make you cry,” Dara “swims like a fish . . . always top three,” etc.) As Jacob narrates the story from his 10th to 15th years, we see the grim effects of Abe's compulsive personality. He’s an insane perfectionist; after Jacob’s bar mitzvah, the boy has to write 20 thank-yous a night, “each note will be individually checked for proper spelling, grammar, syntax, and word choice,” and when the poor kid falls short, Abe throws his usual screaming tantrum. He never actually hits anyone, but the verbal and psychological abuse are truly scary. Wife Claire finally has enough and moves out in 1981—of course, Abe demands joint custody. The author realistically shows Claire as a loving mother who nonetheless fails her children by being too occupied by her new marriage and career to fully protect them from Abe. Eldest son Asher simply defies Dad, but Jacob can’t so quickly reject a man whose love he feels even as it drives him to desperation. In the most brutally funny scene here, Abe “apologizes” for the thank-you card tantrum while driving Jacob to the hospital (he’s broken his wrist smashing a wall), then begins chattering about plans for an Annie Hall party while his white-lipped son counts the blocks to the ER. Though Jacob learns near story’s end he that can't depend on Asher to rescue him, there’s no real resolution in this primal scream ripped from adolescence: it’s just painfully honest and surprisingly compassionate.

Compulsively readable, in a horrifying sort of way. What will Braff do next now that he’s got that off his chest?

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2004

ISBN: 1-56512-420-0

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE RECOGNITIONS

by William Gaddis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 1955

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This overlong (946 pages) and rather pretentious first novel concerns itself with the impasse of the modern intellectual, living in a world where everyone wears a false face of one kind or another, wanting to believe in something, and "knowing" too much to have faith in anything. The scene is Spain, Rome and Paris in Europe, New York City (mainly Greenwich Village) and a New England town in the United States, and at moments an unnamed Central American Republic. The characters, and they multiply- since Mr. Gaddis has tried to write a "novel without a hero", range from hipsters and homosexuals to spoiled Catholics and Puritans to aimless pseudo-intellectuals, town drunkards, and religious fanatics. In what is also a novel without a defined plot, the most interesting parts concern Wyatt Gwyon, as his various activities take him from forging old masters in New York to Spain where he attempts to find some kind of truth; and his father, a New England minister who converts himself to Mithraism- sun worship. But the main fault of the novel is a complete lack of discipline. Gaddis writes with ease and vigor about a Greenwich Village gathering, but repeats this sequence many times. He knows many odd facts about ancient religious and he injects them all. He is familiar with many languages, and there are passages in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Latin and even Hungarian. It is a pity that, in his first novel, he did not have stronger editorial guidance than is apparent in the book for he can write very well- even though most of the time he just lets his pen run on.

Pub Date: March 10, 1955

ISBN: 1564786919

Page Count: 976

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1955

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE RUSH FOR SECOND PLACE
by William Gaddis

- BOOK REVIEW
A FROLIC OF HIS OWN
by William Gaddis

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KAFKA ON THE SHORE

by Haruki Murakami & translated by Philip Gabriel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 24, 2005

A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.

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Two mysterious quests form the core of Murakami’s absorbing seventh novel, whose encyclopedic breadth recalls his earlier successes, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).

In the first of two parallel narratives, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura drops out of school and leaves the Tokyo home he shares with his artist-sculptor father, to seek the mother and sister who left them when Kafka was four years old. Traveling to the small town of Takamatsu, he spends his days at a free library, reconnects with a resourceful older girl who becomes his de facto mentor, and begins to reenact the details of a mysterious “incident” from more than 60 years ago. In 1944, a group of 16 schoolchildren inexplicably “lost consciousness” during an outing in a rural mountain area. Only one of them, Satoru Nakata, emerged from the incident damaged—and it’s he who, decades later, becomes the story’s second protagonist: a childlike, scarcely articulate, mentally challenged sexagenarian who is supported by a possibly guilty government’s “sub city” and possesses the ability to hold conversations (charmingly funny ones) with cats. With masterly skill and considerable subtlety, Murakami gradually plaits together the experiences and fates of Kafka and Nakata, underscoring their increasingly complex symbolic significance with several dazzling subplots and texts: a paternal prophecy echoing the Oedipus legend (from which Kafka also seeks escape); a faux-biblical occurrence in which things that ought not to be in the skies are raining down from them; the bizarre figures of a whore devoted to Hegel’s philosophy; and an otherworldly pimp whose sartorial affectations cloak his true menacing nature; a ghostly forest into which Russian soldiers inexplicably disappear; and—in glancing allusions to Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki—a clever homage to that author’s beguiling 1905 fantasy, I Am a Cat. Murakami is of course himself an immensely reader-friendly novelist, and never has he offered more enticing fare than this enchantingly inventive tale.

A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.