A thoughtful, entertaining look at the ties—music, community, family—that bind.
In this novel, a middle-aged Jewish cantor’s life changes after an unexpected inheritance gives him new freedom.
Many people daydream about what they’d do with a sudden windfall. For Hal Perlmutter, 53, the most exciting part is that he can quit his job as cantor in a New Jersey synagogue. (Chazzonos is Jewish liturgical music that is sung or chanted by a cantor, or chazzan.) He loves the powerful old music and preparing young people for their bar mitzvahs, but—as he sums up in a tour-de-force speech—it comes down to one thing: “I’m tired of bosses….I want to answer only to myself….No bosses. No judges.” But money can’t solve other problems, like a difficult relationship with his daughter or his son’s new boyfriend (fine) being 20 years older than him (not so fine). Then Mimi, Hal’s girlfriend, challenges him: If she’s going to drop her own career and follow his dream of owning a bed-and-breakfast in the Berkshires, she wants to be married. But Hal considers marriage to be a prison. As the cantor muses on the elegance, peace and transcendence of his favorite chazzonos, he must answer to himself and rebuild connections with those he loves. In his debut novel, Rockler—a cantor himself—beautifully evokes Hal’s deep response to music: the haunting melodies, the powerful voices, the joy of song. Anchoring all this is Hal’s continuing sense of connection to the Jewish past. As an elderly Seder participant remarks, “We Jews will always remember Egypt. But who will remember Warsaw?” Rockler is adept at sketching a variety of characters—Mimi, for example, is admirably her own woman. He also nicely shows the progress of Hal’s thoughts and feelings as he slowly acknowledges his role in creating family tensions. After Hal deals with his daughter’s health crisis and rapprochement begins, the book loses some energy in chasing down the red-tape details of Hal’s inheritance and the B&B purchase. The novel could also use a cleanup for some incorrect punctuation.
A thoughtful, entertaining look at the ties—music, community, family—that bind.Pub Date: June 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462028634
Page Count: 276
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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