From Mt. Sinai to the 'burbs

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

Ironically, among the novels reviewed by the Independent this Chanukah, the one about the most unwieldy topic – portraying with due respect and skill the life of Moses – is the most light and least challenging.

Herman Wouk, the author of such weighty fiction as The Caine Mutiny and The Winds of War and philosophical non-fiction as This is My God, has turned to decidedly more comic flare in recent years. His previous novel, Hole in Texas (Little, Brown and Company, 2004), was a satire on an unlikely topic, the politics of particle physics. His most recent publication, The Lawgiver (Simon and Schuster, 2012), takes on Hollywood – and himself.

Apparently, Wouk, 97, has been trying to write a novel about “Maysheh Rabbenu, the Rav of mankind,” for more than half his life. Daunted by the impossibility of doing such a story justice, he has written The Lawgiver, at its heart a romance that brings its lovers together over a proposed film about Moses. Through memos, journal entries, e-mails, meeting notes, Skype transcripts, faxes and other modes of written communication, the process of filmmaking, from concept, to financing, to script, to auditions, to screen and the reviews afterward, is innovatively skewered, lovingly, by Wouk.

The main character, young up-and-coming writer-director Margo Solovei, is a 21st-century version of Wouk’s main character in the now-iconic novel Marjorie Morningstar. But not having read that book won’t prevent enjoyment of seeing how Margo navigates the demanding topic of the film – in which she is helped by her Orthodox Jewish upbringing – and the possibility of a renewed relationship with her estranged first love, successful lawyer Joshua Lewin. The character of Herman Wouk figures into all of this because the principal potential investor demands Wouk’s blessing of the project before he will fund it. The especially tender part of the whole setup is that the real Wouk includes his wife of 63 years as his character’s wife, depicting her as the loving voice of reason in all the craziness – at the end of the book’s epilogue, the author explains that Betty Sarah Wouk, “the girl [he] met by God’s grace in 1944,” died suddenly on March 17, 2011, of a massive stroke. He writes of her “self-effacing and incisive brilliance” and how he still has the small photograph she sent him when he was at sea: “It has been on my desk in all our wandering,” he writes, noting that it will continue to be there while he lives to work on two more planned books.

Writing from the opposite end of the literary career spectrum is Israeli writer Shani Boianjiu, 25, whose debut novel, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (Hogarth Books, 2012), will be a hard act to follow.

The first chapter, “Other People’s Children,” draws in readers immediately with its urgent pace, insolent tone, sardonic humor, explicit language, non-sequential thoughts and serious subject matter. It introduces, from Yael’s perspective, three 17-year-old friends: Yael, Avishag and Lea. They will soon be separated, as they enter their mandatory military service. But, while they will witness new hardships, fears, horrors and more intense boredom, they are by no means innocent, all having dealt with tragedy already by the time they are conscripted, and they will maintain their connection.

This is an important read for anyone wanting to understand more about what military service entails and how it affects those who serve. Boianjiu is a talented writer, not making any moral pronouncements, but presenting what seem to be honest portrayals of various situations in which soldiers would find themselves and how they might react; and she makes readers care about what happens to her three protagonists. She herself served in the Israel Defence Forces for two years and writes in detail about types of ammunition and weaponry, checkpoint procedures and other aspects of military life.

The People of Forever is really “a day in the life” novel or, in this instance, “a few years in the life.” The writing style unfortunately doesn’t vary much, although the chapters alternate between Yael, Avishag and Lea as the storytellers. The only other minor criticism is that the last section of the novel loses the sense of urgency and reads like a “Where are they now?” epilogue, yet is almost 50 pages long. Before that point, however, the book is a fascinating read, an intriguing character study of three very different women, as well as a thought-provoking genesis for political and social analysis. There are scenes that readers will not forget.

Another heart-wrencher is Edeet Ravel’s The Cat (Penguin Canada, 2012), which documents the grief of a mother who loses her son when he is killed by a reckless driver, as he is playing near the road. Born with a disfiguring stain, ill treated by her parents and divorced, Elise retreats further from the world after her son’s death. Her only incentive to stay alive is the cat that she and her son brought home from an animal shelter together.

While the cat features less than one might expect in a novel so titled, Pursie’s presence is felt and the book rightfully centres on Elise. Structured as a journal of sorts, it encompasses the first six months of her trying to deal with her son’s absence, each chapter a new month. Despite the emotional heaviness of the book, it is not only about loss, but about the reasons why this woman chooses to live nonetheless, which makes it an inspiring, rather than depressing, read. Unfortunately, just choosing life wasn’t enough for Ravel and she manufactures an ending for Elise that doesn’t follow realistically from what came before. More ambiguity would have been better than such a forced and abrupt conclusion.

By contrast, Jami Attenberg’s third novel, The Middlesteins (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), suffers from no such issues. Some loose ends remain, and a pleasantly surprising alliance is made, leaving readers to contemplate the future of this middle-class suburban Jewish family to whom they’ve been introduced.

Throughout the novel, Attenberg seamlessly drops tidbits about the future into the novel, which focuses on Edie Middlestein, who, as her friends observe at her grandtwins’ b’nai mitzvah, has a “smile so wide, the most charming cackle. It was hard to believe she had been killing herself for years.”

The book begins with a five-year-old, 62-pound Edie, whose parents agreed on only two things: “about how to have sex with each other” and “that food was made of love, and was what made love, and they could never deny themselves a bit of anything they desired.” The reasons for Edie’s overeating, which leads to her weighing more than 350 pounds as a adult, are more complicated than that though and, while Attenberg illustrates this fact with various scenes from Edie’s childhood, youth and early marriage, she makes no judgment about Edie’s compulsion. Attenberg does, however, compassionately and with much humor, tell the story of how Edie’s eating affects her whole family, beginning with her husband, Richard, leaving her because he can’t stand to watch her destroy herself. This act further stresses his relationship with his daughter, Robin, who has her own self-image and intimacy issues, as well as his daughter-in-law, Rochelle, who takes it upon herself to save Edie; his son, Benny, just wants all the problems to magically disappear and he spends a lot of time smoking pot in his backyard.

Attenberg is guilty of some stereotyping – Jews’ purported love of Chinese food, for example – but otherwise writes a tight, original, well-paced, funny and touching novel about a family that is not overtly challenging but will leave readers thinking.

^TOP