It's unsurprising that Singer's new novel, originally published in Yiddish (Der Baal-Tshuve) in 1974, was not quickly offered in English translation: this is the Nobel winner's thinnest, most didactic fiction by far, with strident views (not expressed by IBS directly, it's true) that might warm the hearts of Jerry Falwell & Co. as well as those of Jews opposed to assimilation. The narrator, telling his story to Singer in 1969 Jerusalem, is rabbis' descendant Joseph Shapiro—a Holocaust survivor (he fled from Poland to Russia) who rediscovers his childhood sweetheart, emigrates with her to postwar America, makes big money in real estate, takes an obligatory mistress. . . and is thoroughly disgusted: "I lay deep in the mire and did the devil's work." On the other hand, he doesn't have enough faith to choose religion over Sodom: "I hated the modern world and everything it represented. . . but I had no proof whatsoever that the Torah had been given by God or that there even was a God." Still, faith or no faith, after discovering the infidelities of both wife and mistress, Shapiro renounces his uptown N.Y. life, becomes a Singeresque vegetarian on the spot, wanders into a Lower East Side shul to rediscover the old Jewishness ("the so-called new Jewishness was actually the same as worldliness"), and hears a voice telling him to flee Satan's New York and go to Israel. ("Flee from women who live like whores and demand to be loved and honored.") True, there are stumbling-blocks along the way: a brief surrender to the "Evil Spirit" in the form of a sluttish woman; disillusionment about over-worldly Israel. ("It's just one step from assimilation to conversion, and sometimes no more than a generation or two from conversion to Nazism.") But soon Shapiro leaves Tel Aviv for Jerusalem—joining a study house, becoming a "Talmud Jew," shunning all specks of secular humanism ("The slightest compromise that you make with the culture of the Gentiles and Jewish pagans is a gesture toward evil"), taking a virtuous new wife. . . and finding faith: "Long before you feel a total faith, you must act in a Jewish way. Jewishness leads to faith." Is Shapiro, then, a stand-in for Singer—Not entirely, presumably—since Singer remains in Manhattan with the pagans. But there's no suggestion of skepticism or disagreement here, making it difficult not to read Shapiro's born-again-Jewish opinions—which include wholesale put-downs of Tolstoy, Homer, psychoanalysis, and other worldliness—as the author's. And, though Singer's storytelling genius isn't totally absent from this slight, linear tale, it's primarily for students of his work-and-thought—while much of his usual readership will find it merely puzzling or off-putting.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1983
ISBN: 0374531536
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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