By
– January 27, 2012
This coming-of-age novel is told in a detached narrative voice that echoes the central character’s feeling of displacement. Gabriel grows up in New Orleans, the son of a rabbi who preaches Talmudic certitude and is also described as a “trollist savage,” while the toxic home environment makes his mother constantly sick. It is also their insistence on philosophizing and values and religion which he calls “superstitious monuments to wishful thinking and mind-numbing ritual repetitiveness” that irk Gabriel. When he arrives at Swarthmore College, he immerses himself in the world of science, nature, and rationality. He falls physically in love with Danny Hundert; and spiritually with his twin sister Marghie, as well as with their Hungarian Nobel prize winner parents and their writer friends, who summer together in Wisconsin. But romance is pierced and subplots of getting even revealed, when Danny becomes an antiwar activist and is imprisoned; Marghie gains all her authority on affairs of the heart vicariously from movies; and the Hunderts commit double murder by taking anti-depressants. Gabriel soon realizes “Had the furious craving for other, nobler origins been only a blind?” Taylor writes about very heavy themes with a heavy hand, yet skirts many side issues, like Gabriel’s homosexuality. He concludes that whereas in the natural world there is order and instinct, man must guess, negotiate, make history.
Karen J. Hauser received a B.A. in art history from Stanford. She has worked at various museums and at Sotheby’s and currently does communal volunteer work.
