Sincere but long-winded, Brafman’s story cycles through a limited range of emotional chords, to numbing effect.
After decades spent suppressing sad and angry feelings toward her mother for adultery and the destruction of her childhood happiness, it’s time for anguished Barbara Blumfield to make peace with her parent and herself.
The pendulum swings, slowly, from toxic rage and instability to all-embracing forgiveness in Brafman’s debut, a three-generational mother-to-daughter family portrait that almost loses itself in a vortex of introspection. Although now in her 50s, with a husband, successful teaching job, and daughter of her own, Barbara has never been able to confront or forgive her mother, June Pupnick, for her affair with the “Shabbos goy” in their Orthodox Jewish community in Milwaukee. “My mother torched my home, my shul,” Barbara mourns, full of emotional discomfort, guilt for keeping her mother’s secrets, and skepticism that she can be a good-enough parent to her own daughter, Lili. Brafman’s sober, earnest novel mines this sensitive territory obsessively, focusing on Barbara’s yearnings and undigested feelings to the exclusion of almost everything else. Crosscutting between the 1970s and 2009, the narrative juxtaposes the crises of the past—June's transgressions, a child care episode in California that ended badly, a breakdown—with the problems of today, which mainly involve Lili. Barbara’s coping mechanisms start to fail in the face of the reappearances of the compassionate rebbetzin (rabbi’s wife) of her childhood and also of her mother, newly restored to town by Barbara’s brother after her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. And there’s more, with Brafman ratcheting up the pressure until a very late shift in perspective that, enhanced by an intervention from Lili, allows ill feelings to be swept away in a tide of comprehension and compassion.
Sincere but long-winded, Brafman’s story cycles through a limited range of emotional chords, to numbing effect.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-938849-51-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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