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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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