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CHAZZONOS

Name: CHAZZONOS
Author: Lyle Rockler
ISBN: 978-1462028634

by Lyle Rockler ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2011

A thoughtful, entertaining look at the ties—music, community, family—that bind.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.