This incandescent elegy to age, change, and acceptance burns with an urgency that seems to have pared Calisher’s...
Calisher is the bridesmaid of contemporary American fiction: for more than 50 years an imposingly brilliant stylist whose densely declarative and analytical, richly woven fiction has never achieved the canonical status awarded to many writers far less accomplished.
Calisher has skirted obscurity (in her ebullient “space opera” Journal from Ellipsia, 1965, and In the Palace of the Movie King, 1994), but at her best (Standard Dreaming, 1972, and Mysteries of Motion, 1983, her complex, luminous short stories), she has surveyed the recently concluded century at all its personal, familial, social, and global levels with a verbal eloquence and intensity of observation that make her writing mandatory, if demanding, reading. Sunday Jews, her 15th novel, published in her 91st year, is a summa, and a triumph. Its tower-of-strength central figure is Zipporah Zangwill, an eminent anthropologist and the 60ish Manhattan matriarch of an extended family of intellectuals and activists who define themselves, and are defined by others, by both their adherence to Zipporah’s Jewish heritage and the degrees to which they have fulfilled, or failed to fulfill, their various potentials. When Zipporah’s beloved husband, philosophy professor Peter Duffy, begins a slow decline into senility, she decides to sell their townhouse and stimulate Peter’s enfeebled faculties by touring all the exotic places she had visited and studied. This decision triggers a seamless interweaving of memory, meditation, and narrative, as Zipporah’s plans resolve themselves into a patient, courageous vigil that also becomes an almost unbearably moving celebration of a long and happy marriage. Interpolated stories depicting the conflicted lives of the Zangwill-Duffy children (the most interesting of them is Nell, a world-weary attorney who has borne two illegitimate children) are amply and interestingly developed, but really only secondary. The fulcrum of this rich tale is the love that bonds Zipporah to her husband and also to her splendid grandson Bert, the unlikely vessel through whom all that she cares for will be preserved.
This incandescent elegy to age, change, and acceptance burns with an urgency that seems to have pared Calisher’s often-reviled ornate style down to a taut, focused simplicity and purity. She has often before written as fervently, even as generously, but she has never written better.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100930-9
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.
Christian-fiction writer Martin (The Dead Don’t Dance, not reviewed) chronicles the personal tragedy of a Georgia heart surgeon.
Five years ago in Atlanta, Reese could not save his beloved wife Emma from heart failure, even though the Harvard-trained surgeon became a physician so that he could find a way to fix his childhood sweetheart’s congenitally faulty ticker. He renounced practicing medicine after her death and now lives in quiet anonymity as a boat mechanic on Lake Burton. Across the lake is Emma’s brother Charlie, who was rendered blind on the same desperate night that Reese fought to revive his wife on their kitchen floor. When Reese helps save the life of a seven-year-old local girl named Annie, who turns out to have irreparable heart damage, he is compassionately drawn into her case. He also grows close to Annie’s attractive Aunt Cindy and gradually comes to recognize that the family needs his expertise as a transplant surgeon. Martin displays some impressive knowledge about medical practice and the workings of the heart, but his Christian message is not exactly subtle. “If anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart,” Reese notes of his medical studies. Emma’s letters (kept in a bank vault) quote Bible verse; Charlie elucidates stories of Jesus’ miracles for young Annie; even the napkins at the local bar, The Well, carry passages from the Gospel of John for the benefit of the biker clientele. Moreover, Martin relentlessly hammers home his sentimentality with nature-specific metaphors involving mating cardinals and crying crickets. (Annie sells crickets as well as lemonade to raise money for her heart surgery.) Reese’s habitual muttering of worldly slogans from Milton and Shakespeare (“I am ashes where once I was fire”) doesn’t much cut the cloying piety, and an over-the-top surgical save leaves the reader feeling positively bruised.
Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 1-5955-4054-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: WestBow/Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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