Roth's extraordinary recent productivity (the prizewinning Sabbath's Theater, 1995, and American Pastoral, 1997) continues apace with this impressively replete and very moving chronicle of an academic scandal and its impact on both the aging professor at its center and his friend—alter ego novelist Nathan Zuckerman. In the turbulent summer of 1998 (while the country reacts with prurient dismay to the Bill Clinton—Monica Lewinsky mess), Coleman Silk, classics teacher and Dean of Faculty at New England's Athena College, innocently uses the word “spook” (correctly, as it happens) in class, and is immediately accused of racism. His career and reputation are in ruins, his wife dies as a result of the ensuing emotional trauma, and Silk becomes estranged from his several adult children. Then, his “exploitative” ongoing affair with Faunia Farley, a passive cleaning woman less than half his age, is discovered. Zuckerman, in whom Coleman has confided, befriends him, hears him out—then, following the last of the story’s several climaxes, sedulously “reconstructs” his beleaguered friend's history (“I am forced to imagine. It happens to be what I do for a living”). There's another secret in Coleman's past—and Zuckerman/Roth teases it out and explores its consequences in a back-and-forth narrative filled with surprises that strains plausibility severely, while simultaneously involving us deeply with its vividly imagined characters. In addition to Coleman Silk (whose arrogance and secretiveness in no way lessen our respect for him), Roth creates telling and unusually full characterizations of the semiliterate Faunia (both a pathetic victim of circumstance and a formidably strong woman); her angry ex-husband Les, a Vietnam vet crippled by post-traumatic stress disorder; and even Delphine Roux, Coleman's single-minded feminist colleague, and his most dedicated enemy. And in the long elegiac final scene, Zuckerman contrives a resolution that may confer forgiveness on them all. A marvel of imaginative empathy, generosity, and tact. Roth's late maturity looks more and more like his golden age.
Pub Date: May 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-618-05945-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
In 1939, a six-year-old boy is sent-by his anti-Nazi parents to a remote village in Poland where they believe he will be safe. Things happen, however, and the boy is left to roam the Polish countryside, trying to stay alive, looking for food, shelter, and a principle of Justice to accomodate what he Sees people do to each other and to him. To the blond, blue-eyed peasants in his part of the country, the swarthy, darkeyed boy who speaks the dialect of the educated class is either Jew, gypsy, vampire, or devil. They fear him and they fear what the Germans will do to them if he is found among them, So he must keep moving. In doing so over a period of years, he observes every Conceivable variation on the theme of horror, sadism, and bestiatity. A cockold miller gouges out the eyes of a ploughboy with the back of a spoon. He loses his voice in a pile of human excrement, almost freezes to death underneath-a frozen lake, and is 'hung by his Wrists atop a vicious dog. The boy learns Communism and the principle of revenge from two kindly Russian officers and reluctantly re-joins his parents. Kosinski appears now in the narrative voice with a tract on evil, the culpability of the peasants, the advantages of personal struggle in the country as opposed to anonymous annihilation in the city. The novel proper, without tidying-up, is purely and simply a panoply of horror, expertly wrought and disgusting. There is no more parable or symbolism here than there was at Buchenwald. Jerzy is a brilliant writer, but let the reader beware. It's very hard to take.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1965
ISBN: 080213422X
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1965
BOOK TO SCREEN
More predictable and less profound than her most recent full-scale work (the magical A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015), but...
After a lightweight foray into rewriting Shakespeare (Vinegar Girl, 2016, etc.), Tyler returns to her tried-and-true theme of family life’s emotionally charged complexities.
Eleven-year-old Willa Drake doesn’t really understand the fraught interchanges between her volatile mother and maddeningly mild-mannered father that roil the novel’s opening chapter, set in Pennsylvania in 1967. But as the action leapfrogs to 1977 and she impulsively decides to marry college boyfriend Derek after he stands up to her mother on their first meeting, we see that, in a world of self-dramatizers and placaters, Willa has unconsciously decided to be a placater. The chapter detailing Derek’s death in a California road-rage incident in 1997 suggests that Willa’s placatory pattern is firmly set, an impression buttressed as Part II begins with 61-year-old Willa now married to Peter, another man who patronizes her and expects her to cater to his every whim. But then comes a phone call from Baltimore, where her son’s ex-girlfriend Denise has been hospitalized with a broken leg after a mysterious shooting incident by a neighbor under the mistaken impression that Denise’s daughter is Willa’s granddaughter. This brazenly schematic setup for Willa’s late-life regeneration is redeemed by the fact that it’s utterly characteristic of our maddeningly mild-mannered heroine that she not only doesn’t correct the misunderstanding, but gets on a plane to Baltimore, with Peter in tow complaining all the way. Power dynamics are never simple in Tyler’s portraits of marriage, and when Willa needs to, she quietly gets what she wants. As she gets to know Denise’s prematurely mature daughter, Cheryl, and the array of eccentric folks on their slightly seedy block—all vibrantly portrayed with Tyler’s usual low-key gusto and bracingly dark humor—readers will want Willa to see that others appreciate her sly wit and tolerant acceptance of people’s foibles as whiny Peter does not. But will she? Tyler drags out the suspense a tad longer than the slight plot merits.
More predictable and less profound than her most recent full-scale work (the magical A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015), but Tyler’s characteristic warmth and affection for her characters are as engaging as ever.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52122-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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