A quietly scathing indictment of military culture.
A new novel by a celebrated Israeli writer.
Abigail is a military psychologist. As she treats patients and leads workshops for Israel Defense Forces personnel, she contends also with romantic liaisons, her father’s illness, and her only son’s imminent enlistment. As the novel goes on, it becomes clear that Abigail is not a very good therapist: She sleeps with a former patient, gives up on treating a troubled young man at the nadir of his mental health, and checks her text messages during a session. Moreover, we quickly learn that Abigail’s position is less noble than we might assume. She sees patients with PTSD, but rather than helping them deal with their trauma, Abigail believes her role is to make soldiers into the best and most efficient killers possible. In other words, her labor is for the benefit of the IDF, not the individuals that comprise it. This difference in philosophy causes friction with her father, also a psychologist, and ultimately (and unsurprisingly) comes to a crisis point when Abigail’s son joins the paratroopers and Abigail is forced to approach military psychology not just as an assistant to the army or as the one-time lover of a high-ranking general, but as a mother. As in his previous works, Sarid exposes a troubling element of Israeli culture in an oblique and clever manner. Sarid’s portrayal shows how even the humanity built into these systems intentionally (through the presence of mental health officers, for instance) and implicitly (through a mother-son relationship) cannot redeem the fundamentally inhumane institution of war. By focusing on an element of military culture that is supposedly intended to mitigate harm and showing how it fails to alleviate—and often even worsens—that harm, Sarid’s novel reveals the hollowness of the oft-touted claim that Israel has the “most moral army in the world.” The novel moves slowly and rather predictably, and as a result it sometimes struggles to maintain momentum, but Sarid’s incisive and unflinching social critique makes it worth reading. Though it's hard to finish this novel feeling positive about war or militaries, make no mistake: This is no screed and Sarid is no ideologue, and though his critique is bold, it is also fairly subtle.
A quietly scathing indictment of military culture.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63206-312-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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