A quietly harrowing dissection of the Nazi madness.
The nightmare of German history creeps up on a family in this agonizing drama.
Born into a Germany steeped in genteel anti-Semitism, young Chaim Itzig resolves to abandon his Jewishness forever by changing his name to Christian Luftmann, converting with his wife Lotte to Catholicism and starting over in the pretty town of Dachau. There he prospers as an investment banker and a pillar of church and community, and congratulates himself for building an unassailably German identity. His masquerade turns darkly ironic after World War I, when economic collapse and civil war between communists and right-wing militias prompt his daughter Fanny and her war-hero husband Sepp, who know nothing of her parents’ buried past, to gravitate to the embryonic Nazi party and its promise of order and national revival. The growth of Nazi power and Sepp’s rise in the party hierarchy pose clear dangers to Christian—his family is not only ethnically Jewish but includes a feeble-minded sister who should be euthanized, according to Nazi doctrine—but his confidence in his ability to navigate the turmoil persists until he finally faces an appalling dilemma that he can’t finesse. Rubinstein infuses the narrative with a perceptive sense of history, showing how Nazism gelled out of an ambient racism and authoritarianism, Darwinian social theories, political chaos, class rancor and the longing to avenge a humiliating defeat and regain the mystical camaraderie of the trenches. Yet even as her characters imbibe this noxious brew, they remain complex and sympathetic: some join the Nazis out of fanaticism and hatred, some swoon over Hitler’s charisma, some cannily seize an opportunity to improve their status and prospects and some sign up because of a genuine sense of patriotism. Rubinstein gives us not just a moving saga of German Jewry in extremis, but a subtle, haunting account of how, little by little, out of the most human of motives, a whole society lost its soul.
A quietly harrowing dissection of the Nazi madness.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0965955225
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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