Nadler is a writer’s writer, a fine observer of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of character.
Reflective stories about family relationships—parent-child, grandparent-child, brother-brother, husband-wife—with a focus on generally nonobservant Jews.
Nadler seems to know his characters inside-out and spins out their foibles and frailties in a leisurely fashion. In the first story, “In the Book of Life,” Abe Rivkin has a brief fling with the seductive but manipulative daughter of his longtime friend and business partner, Larry Reinstein—and then discovers that Larry has been having an affair with Abe’s wife. In “Winter on the Sawtooth,” Josh returns home after four months at Stanford to find out his mother is having an affair with the teacher of her memoir-writing course. While Josh’s father knows but doesn’t approve of his wife’s dalliance, Josh, who during his first semester has started to take religion seriously, is angered by his father’s passivity as well as by his mother’s infidelity. In “The Moon Landing,” two brothers, Charlie and Dave, try to come to terms with the death of their parents, who passed away only days apart. Charlie has been trying to make it as a writer in Hollywood and has had modest success with a B-movie script, while Dave is the “successful” son, an affluent attorney who stayed near his parents in Boston but who harbors resentment against Charlie’s abandonment. “Beyond Any Blessing,” the final story in the collection, and one of the best, introduces us to Daniel, whose parents died when he was seven and who was raised by his elderly grandfather, a rabbi. Now, at the age of 90, his grandfather has been let go due to infidelity, and Daniel tries both to help him and to come to terms with his own restless and unintelligible life.
Nadler is a writer’s writer, a fine observer of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of character.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-12647-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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