Rosenbaum has high ambitions, but here he disorients with a kind of jokey hilarity that disrupts his philosophical asides,...
Rosenbaum’s latest (Second Hand Smoke, 1999, etc.) promises an engagement with the relations between art, suffering, and memory, but delivers Mel Brooks without the rim shots in the tale of a blocked Jewish mystery writer whose daughter resurrects ghosts to release his creativity.
The “golems” of the title aren’t traditional golems, but just ghosts—the “golem” was conceived in Jewish mythology as a protector of the Jews of a Prague synagogue. These are the spirits of Primo Levi, Paul Celan, and Jerzy Kosinski, among others, all major Jewish literary figures who committed suicide after lives of remembering the Holocaust. Invoking them gives Rosenbaum’s lightweight fiction a claim to a gravity that the story doesn’t sustain, an especially excruciating failure in the absence of any suggestion of engaged familiarity with the work of these artists. Oliver Levin is a successful mystery novelist whose daughter Ariel ends up with freeing him from his writer’s block. With a handful of mud from the banks of the Hudson, she inadvertently summons up the shades of Celan, Kosinski, and Levi, as well as Jean Amery, Piotr Rawicz, and Tadeusz Borowski, not to mention Levin’s parents, Lothar and Rose, who, like the writers, killed themselves after surviving the Holocaust. The eight ghosts proceed to transform New York City—gas is eliminated as a heating source, the Yankees lose their pinstripes, smoke of all forms is eliminated—and daughter Ariel finds herself startlingly endowed with a gift for klezmer music. Though the ghostly shenanigans are related amusingly, the upshot is Levin’s compulsion to commit suicide himself after getting in touch with his feelings. The ghosts, feeling bad, encourage him to stay alive, and the whole group, father, daughter and ghosts, fly down to Miami, where Lothar and Rose lived, to close the story oceanside.
Rosenbaum has high ambitions, but here he disorients with a kind of jokey hilarity that disrupts his philosophical asides, rendering The Golems of Gotham an unstable mix of camp and earnestness.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-018490-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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