Joyously sweet-natured second outing by Mirvis (The Ladies’ Auxiliary, 1999)—and also pointedly insightful about just how...
A novel of Jewish manners makes gefilte fish of any stereotypes readers may have about Orthodox Jews.
In Brooklyn, Tzippy Goldman, 22, is desperate to find a husband. Pressure comes from her mother, Shayna, whose less religious upbringing and marriage to the big-dreaming/small-earning Herschel have left her insecure about her place in their tight-knit Ultra Orthodox community. Tzippy slogs through countless organized “dates” until she escapes through a year of study in Israel. Meanwhile, in suburban New Jersey, Shayna’s college roommate Naomi and her lawyer husband Joel send their kids to Orthodox Jewish schools but also eat pizza, love baseball, and integrate themselves into the larger community. They’re shocked when their son returns from a term of study in Israel after high school to announce that he’s become Baruch and intends to continue Yeshiva studies in Israel rather than attend Columbia as planned. Tzippy and Baruch/Bryan meet and fall in love, their courtship more or less strictly following religious law. But their marriage uncovers festering tensions in both their parents’ homes. In the fervor of his new religiosity, Baruch/Bryan is obnoxiously know-it-all and defiant against his parents. Fuming at his son’s intransigence, Joel faces his own indifference to strict observance, while, secure in her belief, Naomi explores a more personal, New Age spiritual Judaism. In the meantime, Tzippy’s escape from her overbearing mother seems complete when she and Baruch move to Memphis to manager a kosher restaurant for Herschel. Surprised by how much he enjoys running the restaurant, though it fails under Herschel’s interference, Baruch turns to his competent father for advice, while Tzippy begins college and discovers secular books. As the newlyweds find themselves, the parents (excepting the hopelessly irrepressible Herschel) go through their own metamorphoses. Characters and relationships evolve, defying easy categorization.
Joyously sweet-natured second outing by Mirvis (The Ladies’ Auxiliary, 1999)—and also pointedly insightful about just how complicated it is to lead a religious life.Pub Date: April 5, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4161-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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