Debut fiction and poignant character study that captures the tone of Jewish life in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1949. Bloom brilliantly exploits the novel as a form by drawing on the simultaneity of film editing. Indeed, writers jealous of film's ability to juggle two or three separate scenes into one flow of images will wonder why no one else has tried this device since Jean-Paul Sartre's postwar novel Troubled Sleep, which elided scenes in midparagraph or midsentence. Here, Bloom uses the technique sparingly until the later chapters, which take off like the whoosh of the montages in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. Paranoia about WW III blooms while Jews meet in Bald Sam's luncheonette and tell jokes (an aesthetic against racial pain). Izzy, a former boxer, has returned to Brownsville after fighting in Germany with the 39th Infantry. He has a head full of shrapnel, plus a disability pension, and fears that he's emotionally lobotomized (``I have the feeling whatever's happening, it's not really happening to me''); meanwhile, he lives off his disability, and sometimes plays his concertina in courtyards for coins and for contact with housewives. As a child in Poland, he memorized the complete fund of Jewish jokes told at his father's tavern. Then at ten, fleeing persecution and his father's murder, Izzy, his sister Miriam, and mother came to Depression Brownsville. His mother has since died, and his exhausted sister survives by running a tiny coffeeshop, where Izzy occasionally helps out. Izzy's older friend Meyer Woolf has been pushed by his wife to invite Izzy to dinner in order to meet Meyer's aging niece Celia, and the muted dinner is one of the stronger, more closely woven set-pieces here. Also rich are Izzy's dalliances with Maureen, an aging Irish whore, and with Mary, a librarian crazed by thoughts of the newly announced hydrogen bomb. Memories of Hiroshima Mon Amour and Joyce's Cyclops/bar scene in Ulysses. Not much seems to happen, but a memorable movie lies embedded in these haunting pages.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04047-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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