“The bride stood like a pillar of salt, rigid under layers of itchy petticoats. Sweat dripped down the hollow of her back and collected in pools under her arms staining the ivory silk. She edged closer to The Bedeken Room door, one ear pressed up against it.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (APR 7, 2014)

In The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Eve Harris discloses the secrets of a Chasidic community in Golders Green, London, focusing on the tribulations of three families: the Kaufmans, Levys, and Zilbermans. The Kaufmans have eight daughters, one of whom, nineteen-year-old Chani, is seeking an intelligent, animated, and good-natured husband. The Levys, a well-to-do couple, want only the best for their son, Baruch, and plan to settle for nothing less. The Zilbermans are facing a major crisis. Rabbi Zilberman’s wife, Rivka, is no longer a contented spouse, mother, and homemaker; she is restless, edgy, and depressed. Adding to the tension is the fact that one of her sons, Avromi, a university student, is acting strangely. He is secretive, stays out late, and avoids telling his family where he has been.

Harris goes back and forth in time, creating a well-rounded portrait of a community whose members prize tradition, virtue, and spirituality. If anyone deviates from prescribed standards of behavior–by dressing immodestly, showing too much interest in secular matters, or flouting religious law–he or she risks censure or, in some cases, ostracism. However, the author indicates that many Chasidim have a great deal to be grateful for: particularly the support of relatives, friends, and neighbors and the peace of mind that comes from knowing one’s place in the world.

The cast includes the young and not-so-young, the experienced and naïve, the affluent and those struggling to get by. We observe Chani Kaufman navigating the dating scene with anticipation as well as trepidation. We also meet Baruch Levy, a twenty-year-old who fears that he is not ready to shoulder the responsibilities that marriage entails. Manipulating the matchmaking strings is the smug and calculating Mrs. Gelbmann, a shadchan who relishes the inordinate amount of power that she wields. Readers’ hearts go out to Chani’s mother, a long-suffering matriarch who, at forty-five, has already borne eight daughters and is thoroughly burned out.

Ms. Harris is knowledgeable about the Hasidic lifestyle, and portrays her flawed and troubled characters with understanding, insight, and compassion. Her decision to relate events out of chronological order is initially bewildering. However, it allows us to stand back and consider complex situations from a variety of angles and viewpoints. The author presents the limited options available to young people like Chanie and Baruch. Should they adhere to the accepted laws and customs handed down by their parents or follow a different path that might be more to their liking? Chani wonders, “What was it like to roam freely in the world and not have to think about your every action and its spiritual consequence?” For men and women who find the constraints of a sheltered and choreographed existence limiting, the choice to remain strictly observant is a difficult one. The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is a provocative, enlightening, and engrossing book, written with skill and flair, in which the author explores universal themes that will resonate with anyone who has clashed with loved ones, suffered unbearable losses, and has had to make difficult, life-changing decisions.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 41 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eve Harris
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and an interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Foreign Brides by Elena Lappin

Bibliography:

• The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (2013; April 2014 in US)

“My poor family was in shambles.

It had not always been thus. Ten years before, we’d been a solid unit, dollhouse style, mother, father, boy, and girl.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (AUG 1, 2011)

The Astral, by Kate Christensen, gets its title by way of its namesake, the Astral building in Brooklyn, New York. This building houses the protagonist of this book, an aging poet named Harry Quirk. His last name befits him and his family. They are interestingly dysfunctional in many ways.

Harry was once a somewhat well-known poet, teaching poetry workshops and writing his lyrical poems in rhyming and sonnet style. His publisher and mentor has moved to Europe and his style is now out of favor in the United States. His wife, Luz, decides after thirty years of marriage that Harry is having an affair with his best friend, Marion. Despite Harry’s pleading innocence – and he is innocent – Luz does not believe him and she kicks him out of their apartment in the Astral. It is true that Harry did have an affair twelve years ago with a young poetry student, but since that time he has been true to Luz.

Now homeless and without a job, Harry gets a room in a local flophouse and spends his days drinking at a local watering hole named Maureen’s. He finally lands a job at a Hasidic lumber yard through his crack-smoking Hasidic musician friend, Yanti. Here Harry works in accounts payable and is able to rent a one room apartment in the Astral. He figures that if he lives in the Astral, he’ll be closer to Luz and better able to keep an eye on her comings and goings. He is unable to accept that things are over with Luz and he is determined to win her back.

Harry’s daughter, Karina, is a freegan – she believes in getting all of her possessions for free. She gathers discarded things from the curbside, dumpster dives and goes to supermarket and restaurant trash bins to pick up food. She is very clear that the food she picks up consists only of tossed items with expired dates or unused edibles.

Harry’s son, Hector, is living on a commune and mired in a cult called Children of Hashem. They believe that the Messiah will be coming soon or is already here. Hector is being groomed as the new messiah and also is preparing to marry Christa, the cult’s leader. Karina and Harry want to do an intervention, hoping to get Hector out of the cult.

This is, in its way, a parody of today’s life and also a mirror of what is going on within a certain group of people. These people all live in a little area in Brooklyn and have been friends since the 1970’s. Despite Brooklyn being in New York City, this neighborhood is its own little enclave with everyone gossiping about everyone else. The friends are all interconnected, to the point of all of them seeing the same therapist. The novel makes a big deal of this and the unethical practice of Helen, the therapist they share.

The novel reminded me of what Zoe Heller does so well in her writing and what Christensen tries hard to accomplish but doesn’t quite succeed in pulling off. The parody comes off as stilted and without subtlety. For good parody to work, the reader must be able to see him or herself, or someone they can identify with, in the characters or culture. This doesn’t happen here. The characters are very black and white without hues of gray. For instance, Harry is a complete atheist and Hector and Luz are absolute believers. Things are described as either right or wrong. Luz is a moralistic bully while Harry is a moderate and giving guy. There is a lot of repetition of subject matter as if the author is not sure that the reader remembers what has transpired earlier.

Despite its flaws, Christensen can draw a good description and give frailty to the characters she creates. There is pathos, narcissism, stupidity, and a distinct humor to some of the characters and their situations. Though the book didn’t work for me as well as I’d have hoped, I think that a lot of readers would appreciate it more than I did.

I am a fan of Christensen’s and loved Trouble and The Epicure’s Lament. I continue to look forward to her writings.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Christensen
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of: Trouble The Great Man

Bibliography:

• In the Drink (1999)
• Jeremy Thrane (2001)
• The Epicure’s Lament (2004)
• The Great Man (2007)
• Trouble (2009)
• The Astral (2011)

Nonfiction:

• Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites (July 2013)

“When Cass, in all the safety of his obscurity, set about writing a book that would explain how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience — so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost — and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, […] he’d had no idea of the massive response his efforts would provoke.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (FEB 20, 2011)

With a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton, Guggenheim and MacArthur (genius) awards, several novels, and non-fiction studies of Gödel and Spinoza under her belt, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is nobody’s fool. But I can’t decide whether her decision to populate her latest novel exclusively with people like herself is good or bad. Set in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, partly at Harvard but mainly at another elite university which might be a fictionalized Brandeis, the entire cast of characters seems to consist of academic philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians, or theologians, all determined to prove that they are smarter than anybody else. Readers who enjoyed the intellectual name-dropping of Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of a Hedgehog might well like this, but it can be hard going. I soon began to wish for at least one character who did not know the Wittgenstein Paradox or Heideggerian Hermeneutics inside out. After about 80 pages, however, I found myself drawn into the strange world of the book, for three main reasons. I list them in increasing order of importance.

1. Goldstein can be very funny. There is splendid scene when the great professor Jonas Elijah Klapper (think Harold Bloom) makes a state visit to the Valdener Rebbe, head of a Hasidic sect headquartered in a building described as “A Costco that had found God.” In the ensuing dialogue, the professor tries hard to impress with obscure references to early Jewish mystics, while the Rebbe merely wants to discuss how best to secure federal matching funds. Nevertheless Klapper treats this as deep rabbinical wisdom expressed in parables, silencing a doubter with the words: “You are the sort who, should she witness the Messiah walking on water, would be impressed that his socks had not shrunk.”

2. The chief character, Cass Selzer, is the least pretentious of the lot and really very likeable. A psychologist, he has recently published VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS ILLUSION, vaulting him to the New York Times bestseller list and a Time Magazine feature as “The atheist with a soul.” The 36 Arguments of the book’s title form the appendix to Selzer’s book, reprinted as a 50-page appendix to the novel. Each argument is laid out in clear syllogistic form only to be dismissed by equally clear analysis of its flaws. But for the most part, Cass leaves the logical legerdemain to the appendix. As a character in the story, he speaks normal conversational English, and is really quite sympathetic as he moves from hero-worship to rejection of the monstrous Klapper, and tries to find a life partner among a sequence of dauntingly brilliant women.

3. The book does indeed have a soul. The visit to the Valdener Rebbe (a distant relative of Cass) is more than a comic tour-de-force. Cass also meets the Rebbe’s son, Azarya, clearly a mathematical genius and as lovable for his personality as amazing in his desire for knowledge. At the age of only six, he explains discoveries in number theory that he has made by himself, describing the various classes of primes as orders of angels as real to him as Cherubim and Seraphim. Uniquely, he unites religion and science, not as opposites, but in a single world view. There is a great set-piece which is an ecstatic description of a “shabbes tish” or ceremonial meal, which draws me further into the spirit of Hasidic life than anything I have read before, including Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. Towards the end of the book, Cass argues against the existence of God in a public debate at Harvard. But the last chapter is not left to the arguments of philosophers but to another celebration at the Valdener shul, a glowing scene that somehow makes the entire debate almost irrelevant.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 70 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Goldstein
EXTRAS:	36 Arguments website with excerpts and reading guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on the subject of God: God is Dead by Ron Currie, Jr. And, our review of: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Bibliography:

• The Mind-Body Problem (1983)
• The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989)
• The Dark Sister (1993)
• Strange Attractors: Stories (1993)
• Mazel (1995)
• Properties of Light (2000)
• 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (January 2010)

Nonfiction:

• Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (2005)
• Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006)

“He asked me to keep everything,” Sandra said.

George wasn’t listening. “Do you see this? A paper clip!” The silver wire clipped several scraps of paper to a recipe for petites meringues a l’ananas. George pulled it off, and showed Sandra the rusty impression left behind. “This is criminal.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (AUG 21, 2010)

One of Goodman’s favorite authors is Jane Austen and it shows in her subtle, wryly witty social comedies. This latest takes place on both coasts between 1999 and 2002 and centers on two California sisters: responsible, ambitious, principled Emily and flighty, vegan, philosophical Jess. The title character, though deceased, plays a beguiling role in the plot.

The major part of the action takes place in and around Berkeley. Emily, 28, has founded an up-and-coming dot-com company. Jess, at 23, is floundering in grad school, majoring in philosophy, working in an antiquarian bookstore, taking Incompletes in her courses. She’s also very caught up in Save the Trees, though she has a phobia of heights and can’t participate in any of the redwood occupying.

Their mother died when Emily was 10 and Jess 5, and left letters for each of them to open on their birthdays, up to age 25. Emily treasures her letters but Jess, who barely remembers her, had read them all on her twelfth birthday and found them wanting. Still, passages from the letters sprinkle the narrative. Their long-departed mother had high hopes for them and much advice. Emily worries that Jess has not found the “profession” her mother hoped she would; Jess counters with barbs about Emily’s high-energy boyfriend, Jonathan, another ambitious dot-com founder who lives in Boston and seldom sees Emily.

“’Find someone musical,’ Jess quoted, for she was not above citing Gillian’s letters in a pinch, and she knew Jonathan could not carry a tune. ‘Find someone giving. Find someone who will sacrifice for you.’ “

Emily and Jonathan both have imminent IPOs. All the young techies are giddy with prospects of immense wealth. On a trip to see Jonathan, Emily, worried that her love isn’t enough, impulsively decides to share a company secret. “She would prove herself to herself. Satisfy his curiosity and confide in him, share her work, her life, her most secret joy.”

Jonathan, when Emily demands a similar confidence, lies. And thereafter, he struggles mightily not to seize her new secret for his own company. Will his better instincts win out? The reader suspects not. The reader also knows the bubble is about to burst – even the dot-commers have some inkling – and our omniscience contributes to the suspense. Will they get rich? Will it all come to nothing? Goodman is good enough to make us care.

Meanwhile Jess can barely be bothered to scrape up the money required to get in on Emily’s IPO. She shows up late for work at the bookstore and scares customers away with her strong opinions. But George, the proprietor, a 41-year-old retired Microsoft multimillionaire, can’t keep his eyes off her, despite her infuriating habits and greasy boyfriend from Save the Trees. His wit is dry. “ ‘Three months,’ George said as he was locking up. ‘I didn’t realize Save the Trees had been around that long.’ “

George has never married, though he insists he wants to. His girlfriends say he refuses to commit; George says he hasn’t found the right person. The bookstore is more a hobby than a business, though he can be cutthroat where sales and acquisitions are concerned. George is also a bit of a curmudgeon. He has eschewed the technology that made him rich and is known to fulminate about the end of Western Civilization. He hits his hectoring stride while on a jog with a friend, who picks up the pace, “hoping to outrun George’s rant.”

“ ‘What was it Jess said today?…’ George panted, trying to keep up. ‘Ruskin is a dogmatic, self-indulgent, sexually repressed misogynist with an edifice complex.’

Nick smiled. ‘Sounds just like you.’ “

The manic excitement of the dot-com frenzy contrasts with George’s deliberate preservation of the past. Chips and get-rich-quick schemes versus venerable books and timeless architecture. Jess finds both worlds materialistic and does her best to stay destitute while longing for the peace of mind lack of debt can confer.

The cookbook collector comes into the narrative haltingly, a book at a time. When the collector’s niece finally admits George to the collection, Jess finds herself entranced as well, as much by the notes and drawings interleaved with the recipes as the gorgeous, worn books themselves. Once George gets over his horror at the desecration, he too finds himself curious about the collector, a man with whose obsession he can identify.

There are a lot of secondary characters –including a couple of Hasidic rabbis – and Goodman involves us in each of the subplots they inspire (although the bookshop always beckons). Even the characters we don’t much like – or at least disapprove of – come to life on the page. One of the Austen-like things she does is to allow her characters to gently thwart our hopes through willfulness, misunderstanding, timidity, occasionally even by accident or fate. But they grow and learn. Jess, researching the cookbooks, looks at her mother’s letters with new eyes. “What was it about them? What was it she had overlooked before? Their secrecy. The obliqueness of the language drew her in, where before it had confused and bored her.”

The writing is unflaggingly delightful, and Goodman doesn’t let wit stand in the way of weighty issues. Among the ponderables are values, ethics and the meaning of life – or at least the meaning of how we choose to live. A wonderful novel, with all its plots resolved, some in ways that won’t please everyone. Readers of Goodman’s other novels will love this one and fans of Cathleen Schine, Helen Simonson, Marian Keyes, or Penelope Lively should enjoy it as well.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 125 readers
PUBLISHER:	The Dial Press; 1 edition (July 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Allegra Goodman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Authors you may also like: Cathleen Schine Penelope Lively

Bibliography:

• Total Immersion: Stories (1989)
• The Family Markowitz (1996)
• Kaaterskill Falls (1998)
• Paradise Park (2001)
• Intuition (2006)
• The Other Side of the Island (2008)
• The Cookbook Collector (July 2010)

“On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad. She was fifteen and her crack-up marked a turning point in both our lives. ‘I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,’ she said in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place I could not dream or imagine. I wanted to grab her and bring her back, but there was no turning back. Suddenly every point of connection between us had vanished.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (FEB 17, 2010)

Michael Greenberg’s brilliant and mesmerizing memoir of his daughter’s madness is a poignant and terrifying book about the depths and peaks of mania and the desperate struggle that a loved one will go to in order to bring someone back from the world of psychosis.

When Greenberg’s daughter, Sally, first becomes psychotic, he thinks it is more her creativity than anything else. He is slow to recognize her manic state. But then, who would first assume that someone they love has gone to a place of madness. “But how does one tell the difference between Plato’s “divine madness” and gibberish? Between enthousiasmos (literally, to be inspired by a god) and lunacy? Between the prophet and the “medically mad.”

A long journey ensues for Sally and her familiy: hospitalization, horrendous psycho-pharmacological interventions, psychiatric care, day hospitals, regimens for behavioral therapy and behavioral contracts. The medications make her weary and unable to concentrate. She becomes sluggish and unlike her quick and creative self. Her father decides to try the medication to get an idea of what it is doing to Sally. He says, “It begins to hit me – – in waves. I feel dizzy and far away, as if I am about to fall from a great height but my feet are nailed to the edge of the precipice, so that the rush of the fall itself is indefinitely deferred. The air feels watery and thick, until finally I am neck-deep in a swamp through which it is possible to move only with the greatest of effort, and then only a few feet at a time.” Such is the state that his daughter is in with the medicine. Without it, however, she is mad.

Her identity becomes obscured. Who is this beloved daughter? How did she get to the state she is in? “I keep asking myself the obvious question, the helpless question. How did this happen? And why? One has cancer or AIDS, but one is schizophrenic, one is manic depressive, as if they were innate attributes of being, part of the human spectrum, no more curable than one’s temperament or the color of one’s eyes.” The author struggles with how to view his beloved Sally, how to separate her from her disease, how to separate himself from her disease.

The book is peopled by interesting characters. There is Steve, the author’s mentally ill brother for whom he is caretaker. There is a family of Hasidic Jews in the Psychiatric unit, looking over and caring for one of their own. There is the author’s wife, a dancer and choreographer who loves Sally very much. There is Sally’s biological mother, the author’s ex-wife, who is paralyzed with fear at Sally’s illness and first hopes that some homeopathic remedies will make a difference. There is the author’s well-dressed and lovely mother who searches her past to assure the author that Sally is not, absolutely is not, like his brother Steve.

Sally eventually reaches an equilibrium of recovery and remission from her manic depression. She is able to return to school though she is fearful and reticent about her history as a “mental patient.” The story has no happy ending, as the disease does not just disappear. It may hide for a while but it is ever present. Sally has a lifetime of heavy-duty medications and psychiatric interventions in order for her to maintain a semblance of normalcy. She is forever in the grips of the mental health system, a system not always user friendly to families and loved ones.

The author paints a realistic and painful picture of what mental illness in a family can do to the victim and her loved ones. It is a powerful picture, one that is not soon to be forgotten. Anyone who has every dealt with mental illness or has an interest in it will be enriched by this book. It is a must-read for any person who loves someone who is mentally ill or is touched by mental illness in any way. This means all of us.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 99 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (September 8, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Hurry Down Sunshine
AMAZON PAGE:	Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Greenberg
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book on the schizophrenia: The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn Saks And in fiction: Lowboy by John Wray

Bibliography:

• Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness (September 2008)
• Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life (September 2009)