Yes, Potok (In The Beginning, The Chosen) is once again following a young Jewish protagonist on a journey that ends, somewhat too perfunctorily, with a reaffirmation of Faith. But this time the doubts along the way are so textured, so centrally disturbing, that this flawed, richly challenging novel (perhaps too challenging for some of Potok's usual audience) offers considerably more to the non-believer than Potok's previous fiction. The quiet, questing hero here is Gershon Loran, "a scared twentieth-century Jew with visions." His parents were killed in a riot while on a 1930s landbuying trip to Israel; he's grown up in Brooklyn with his uncle and aunt, fragile beings shattered by their son's WW II death. So by now, circa 1950, Gershon has turned inward, away from the horror—to the study of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism); at a N.Y. seminary he becomes the protege of a great Kabbalist, spurning an equally great sage of Talmud (a more worldly, law-oriented field of study). But Gershon's roommate at the seminary turns out to be a boozy embodiment of the horrors from which Gershon is fleeing: he is Arthur Leiden, the handsome, joking, guilt-wracked son of a key A-bomb physicist. And after Gershon has spent a year as a chaplain in postwar Korea (functioning well in the real world but riveted by memories and visions), Arthur turns up there too, obsessively determined to visit Japan. Hiroshima, of course, is the destination—and Arthur says Kaddish at the monument there. But for Gersbon there is also the unsettling impact of the vast alien Orient, seemingiy outside the "world" of the Old Testament: "He was being taught the loveliness of God's world by a pagan land." So finally, after Arthur's plane-crash death—headed for yet one more Japan pilgrimage—Gershon's visions and voices debate the right response of a new generation to "the shards left by the giants." This finale, with Gershon repeating the Kaddish and returning to the Kabbalah, seems oddly evasive. And, throughout, Potok slips into platitudes, with some ponderous stretches. But the novel is tremendously shapely, stately in pace yet dramatic and vivid in its canny storytelling. And, though occasionally overdone, the, haunting interplay of "light" imagery (from Kabbalah legend to Hiroshima's "death-light" to the fluorescents in a delicatessen) reflects a fundamental spiritual questioning that goes beyond secular concern. A dark tapestry of a book, then, more suggestive than powerful, with threads that may reach out and hold a surprising range of readers.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1981
ISBN: 0449001148
Page Count: 389
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1981
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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