The story covers small territory, but it explores it in an insightful, amiable way.
Fried’s second novel (My Father’s Fighter, 2004) is a smart account of a New Yorker’s mid-life musings.
September 11th has passed and Bush is about to invade Iraq, but what’s really troubling Joseph Steiner is that, at 49, he has managed to lose his job as a TV executive. He knew the lay-offs were coming, but forewarning hardly compensates for the emasculation of middle-age joblessness. On a whim, he and his wife Mary, a left-wing publisher, accept an offer to join friends for Christmas in Paris, giving Joseph an opportunity to lick his wounds. Judith and Tad, American journalists stationed in Paris, have been sent to the frontlines to cover the war, and Joseph and Mary get to stay at their posh Saint Germain apartment and shop the Boulevard. The suspicion that his friends are leading better, more meaningful lives is reinforced when he meets up with other old buddies: Johnny, an American ex-pat involved in edgy Parisian theater and the recent recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, and Gilles, a handsome doctor married to a bestselling Irish author. As dinner discussions revolve around trite topics like Karl Lagerfeld’s newly slim figure, unhappy Joseph contemplates his own slightly pallid life, remembering his days as a reticent and self-conscious student in Paris. As their holiday comes to an end, Joseph and Mary have Christmas dinner at Gilles’s country chateau, where Joseph is confronted by an angry economist, whose harsh words—that Joseph is an emotional infant, a trait common among Americans—rings painfully true.
The story covers small territory, but it explores it in an insightful, amiable way.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-57962-114-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
This first novel, ostensibly about the friendship between two boys, Reuven and Danny, from the time when they are fourteen on opposing yeshiva ball clubs, is actually a gently didactic differentiation between two aspects of the Jewish faith, the Hasidic and the Orthodox. Primarily the Hasidic, the little known mystics with their beards, earlocks and stringently reclusive way of life. According to Reuven's father who is a Zionist, an activist, they are fanatics; according to Danny's, other Jews are apostates and Zionists "goyim." The schisms here are reflected through discussions, between fathers and sons, and through the separation imposed on the two boys for two years which still does not affect their lasting friendship or enduring hopes: Danny goes on to become a psychiatrist refusing his inherited position of "tzaddik"; Reuven a rabbi.... The explanation, in fact exegesis, of Jewish culture and learning, of the special dedication of the Hasidic with its emphasis on mind and soul, is done in sufficiently facile form to engage one's interest and sentiment. The publishers however see a much wider audience for The Chosen. If they "rub their tzitzis for good luck,"—perhaps—although we doubt it.
Pub Date: April 28, 1967
ISBN: 0449911543
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
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