A novel that is as enjoyable as it is intelligent: a truly brilliant book and a remarkable achievement.
A campus novel set in 1959 that explores a footnote in the life of Benzion Netanyahu, father of Benjamin Netanyahu, the then-future Israeli prime minister.
Cohen's narrator, Ruben Blum, is an economics professor at a college in upstate New York (a thinly veiled Cornell); he specializes in the hilariously boring field of tax history, and he is the lone Jewish faculty member in his department. As the token Jew, he is assigned to lead the committee considering whether to hire one Benzion Netanyahu. As Blum considers Netanyahu's case, he receives letters from various colleagues and associates of the candidate about the man and his scholarly work, which lead him to peruse Netanyahu's scholarship himself. This scholarship and these accounts—vastly varied as they are—illuminate the foibles, strengths, and contradictions (ranging from the minor and humorous to the significant and existential, and every combination in between) of a fascinating individual and, on Cohen's part, a richly imagined character. Netanyahu's foibles, strengths, and contradictions in turn illuminate the complexities of Jewish history and sociopolitics; the result is a wide-ranging, truly original novel that limns these topics from what feels like infinite angles. Cohen has taken on a hugely ambitious project, and if each element that his narrative explores—Jewish history, the history of Zionism, the history of antisemitism, the status of Jews in higher education, the conditions and results of Jewish American assimilation—is a proverbial stone, Cohen's project involves not just leaving no stone unturned, but also thoroughly inspecting each stone first. The result is a densely intellectual novel, and if it is at times pedantic, the pedantry is rarely unwarranted; it is simply a function of this conscientiousness. Formally, the novel's style is as energetic, expansive, and exploratory as its content; Cohen is an extraordinarily skilled writer, and his nearly manic prose is well suited to this ambitious and expansive, yet masterfully controlled, novel. If this sounds complex, that's because it is. But the complexity does not diminish the novel's readability; it is in no way a lightweight work, but it is a delightful and gratifying one.
A novel that is as enjoyable as it is intelligent: a truly brilliant book and a remarkable achievement.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68137-607-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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