My Name Is Asher Lev

Where to start with this moving book about the creative impulse and the conflict between individuality and community. Chaim Potok's layered novel about a young Hasidic boy with an artistic gift, so redolent with Jewish arcana, is as universal as the parent-child relationship. The fictional Ladover community, with its Rebbe both menacing and wise, is more defined than most, but Asher Lev's conflict with its strictures would be much the same in a middle class Midwestern community.

How this conflict tears at Asher Lev's soul and how his response to it tears at his parents and his community provides enough dramatic tension for several novels. How Potok brings this to a point in the climax of the book, foreshadowed from the beginning but still so unexpected, makes this a masterpiece.

From an early age, Asher Lev drew things. I did, too, when I was little, though not as compulsively as Asher. "A million people can draw," his uncle told him, so I suppose I was one of those million. It quickly became clear that Asher's drawing was beyond the ordinary and that he truly possessed a gift. The question for his father and the Hasidic community was whether the gift came from the Lord or from the "other side." When young Asher evinced a passion for drawing the crucifixion of "that man" as well as nudes, the question was settled, at least for Asher's father.

In simple family scenes, Potok shows how hostility grew between father and son and how Asher's mother was caught in between, and what it cost them all. Asher refused to go to Vienna when the Rebbe dispatched his father to establish Ladover yeshivas throughout Europe because he needed his familiar neighborhood to nurture his gift. So the father went alone. The Rebbe in his wisdom apprenticed Asher to a Jewish artist, the fabulous Jacob Kahn, in the hopes his pursuit of art, which clearly could not be denied, would not lead him away from Judaism.

If there's anyone who can read how Jacob Kahn schooled Asher Lev in art without being moved, they should not be reading fiction. The summers together in Provincetown, painting and walking on the beach and talking, are as close to idyllic as real life can get.

Asher grows older, but we are so well acquainted with him by this time that we never lose sight of that wondering young boy. Nor does Potok let us get distracted. The action is totally focused on Asher's development as an artist. By the time the artist Asher Lev is ready for his climactic one-man show at a Madison Avenue gallery, your heart is in your throat as you see what inevitably must come to pass. The powerful forces Potok has unleashed -- creativity and religion, filial devotion and artistic integrity, individual and community -- come crashing together in a climax that almost literally takes your breath away.

The Emperor of Ocean Park

I'm abandoning this book at p. 149. It's going very slowly. I find it way too wordy, and in general a bit self-indulgent and ultimately sloppy as a work of fiction. There are digressions, almost riffs, that seem to have little to do with anything -- just too much detail. In the guise of character development, the author imposes on us his candidate for the best DVD ever made and preaches to us about the importance of community service.

Most of all, though, the characters are simply not sympathetic. The narrator, in many ways an alter ego of the author, tells us so often that he is not really a nice man that you begin to believe it. One of his least endearing qualities is his devotion to a calculating, selfish and blatantly unfaithful wife. Other characters are cardboard.

The book is hyped as a window on the world of upper middle class African Americans, which, not too surprisingly, is remarkably similar to the world of upper middle class white Americans, except for occasional flashes of what the author/narrator must think is attitude. Ho-hum.

Stephen Carter has a lawyer's facility with words, but the prose in the end is pedestrian. There are occasional witty remarks and some nice turns of phrase. If I was spending a lazy week at the beach, I might have the patience for this, but I need something more substantive to sustain me in the workaday world.

I rarely decide to abandon a book. It usually just happens that I put it down one day and don't pick it up again, and then find myself starting something else. Occasionally, I'll come back to a book I abandoned and for some reason find it more appealing. Might happen here, but I doubt it.

In memoriam: Kirkus Reviews

The news last week that Kirkus Reviews would fold after 75-some years was greeted largely with a ho-hum or, in some quarters, outright glee. Kirkus was famous for being negative and one agent was quoted as saying "Good riddance."

The point of the pre-publication reviews -- Library Journal and Booklist are two other standard reviewers -- is to help librarians decide what to order. When newspapers did book reviews, they also helped editors decide which books to review, so they were influential beyond the tiny circle of actual readers. And of course they provide jacket blurbs if your book doesn't get a lot of reviews in other media.

My first book, Debt Shock, happily displayed a blurb from Kirkus Reviews on the paperback edition: "Unequaled in its astringency and vigor...With one terse, wry, inarguable statement after another, Delamaide...lays bare the crisis that made headlines." Because Kirkus had such a reputation for negative reviews you felt doubly good if you got a good one, and didn't take it personally if you got a bad one.

The review for Gold was somewht more tepid, though not out-and-out negative. "A modestly effective end-of-the-financial-world thriller involving skulduggery on and off the commodities exchange....Tidy plotting, solid background, and brisk pace make an appealing debut until the story, along with the gold market, collapses near the end." Oh well.

Finally, Kirkus had some kind words for Superregions: "An engaging look at Europe's economic prospects, forcefully demonstrating that the continent's future will depend on furthering regional alliances that transcend outmoded and restrictive national boundaries. ...Superregions is full of good ideas, and a fine guide for researchers, businesspeople and others interested in Europe's -- and everyone's -- future."

Sadly, my hiatus in publishing has outlived Kirkus Reviews. They were by and large kind to me, so I don't mind standing up at the memorial service and murmuring some praise. I always had the feeling that those librarians and editors, if not the blurb writers, appreciated having a more skeptical point of view in looking at new books. After all, you can't buy or review all of them.

The Hungry Tide

It doesn't get more exotic than Amitav Ghosh's novel of the tide country in the Bay of Bengal. Tigers, crocodiles and river dolphins teem in this parallel narrative of a present-day marine mammal researcher and the story of a little-known massacre a generation earlier.

Along with Ghosh's beautiful, literate prose, there are stories with human emotions -- in all their resplendent ambivalence -- that are at once so firmly embedded in their Indian and Indian-American characters and yet so universal that the reader is carried along in a tide of the author's making.

Piya, the Indian-American researcher; Kanai, the New Delhi yuppie; and Fokir, the unlettered fisherman form an unusual love triangle -- in fact with Moyna, Fokir's wife, two intersecting triangles -- and this drama is quite moving when it reaches its climax.

The parallel story of Nirma and Kumus, with Kanai, Nilima and Horen bridging the time gap adds a whole dimension to the main narrative and the two stories build slowly to their crescendos in virtual lockstep. Nirma, the wannabe revolutionary who becomes a rural headmaster and failed writer, is the dreamer out of step with reality. His wife, Nilima, is more practical, realistic, focused on the moment. And yet in the end, it is Nilima who is left with a some bitterness, conceding that one practical idea Nirmal had amidst his dreaming was responsible for saving numerous lives. Horen, who ferries people around in both narratives, turns out to be not such a minor character.

Ghosh's prose is at time lyrical and the reader is willing to hear the most beautiful speeches from the most unlikely characters. Horen, taciturn through the book, erupts near the end with a soliloquy that Shakespeare would have been proud of, and Moyna is able to articulate the hidden undercurrents of emotion. When she asks Kanai to remind Fokir, her husband, that Piya is only here for a short time, Kanai wants to know why he should be the one to talk to him and not her.

"Only a stranger can put such things into words," Moyna says. "Because words are just air...When the wind blows on the water, you see ripples and waves, but the real river lies beneath, unseen and unheard. You can't blow on the water's surface from below...Only someone who's outside can do that, someone like you."

One small bonus from reading this book is an appreciation for Rilke's Duino Elegies, which Nirmal quotes often, referring only to the Poet. But there are many rich bonuses -- an excursion into cetology, a branch of the study of marine mammals; a tour of the Sundarbans archipelago extending from Calcutta into the Bay of Bengal and sheltering the city from cyclones; a view of the mixed Hindu-Islamic culture along the border between India and Bangladesh; a history lesson about the massacre at Morichjhapi. Ghosh is not afraid to stand things on their heads -- by showing, for instance, the potential damage the West's obsession with saving tigers can have on the poor in those regions.

But The Hungry Tide is above all a novel, with romance, adventure and stories that enrich our understanding of how people think and feel.

Vanished

Joseph Finder is the acknowledged master of the corporate thriller and I enjoyed his earlier books, Power Play and Paranoia. But he seems to have lost some of crackle and pop in this book. The pages keep turning, but the payoff is not great.

For one thing, he strays in this book away from a purely corporate world, setting the book in DC and making a fictional version of Blackwater the central corporate entity and mixing politics, kickbacks and mercenaries into the story.

One annoying thing, which is difficult to pull off and which doesn't really work here, is switching back and forth from first person to third person in the narration.

But the main problem is that the hero, Nick Heller, who is the first person narrator, isn't as interesting as Finder's earlier protagonists. In fact, none of the characters, with the possible exception of Heller's teenage nephew, arouses much sympathy or takes on any real dimension. This may have been true in the earlier books as well, but it was less noticeable then. Several of these characters are simply plot devices garnished with a tell-tale trait that don't really convince. There is no love interest for the hero, who plays protector to his sister-in-law and nephew (his brother is the one who vanished), and no back story for that dimension either.

But Nick Heller is of course an ace, an ex-Special Forces, martial arts, all-around know-it-all. For some reason, he kept reminding me of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther character, but without the charming quirks. Finder had better luck with his business types. He can't match Flynn or Balducci or Silva on the op hero. The sister-in-law is a virtual nonentity, and the DC police officer role seems written for Morgan Freeman to play.

The plot, too, in contrast to the earlier books, is fairly derivative. There are a couple of twists, but the main line of the plot was never really in doubt. The climax and the denouement are a bit out of sync and both fall flat.

In short, if you want to read a book by Joseph Finder, read Power Play and give this one a pass.

The Zero

This book by Jess Walter, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2006, is a bit like Don DeLillo meets John Le Carré meets T. Coraghessan Boyle. DeLillo's influence -- White Noise, Libra, even The Names -- dominates but there is also an original voice, the same that I encountered and liked in Citizen Vince. Walter's narrators are intelligent and empathetic. The books are sophisticated and postmodern but nonetheless compelling in the fluency of the prose, the satirical humor and the genuine emotion they portray.

The narrator in The Zero, Brian Remy, has gaps in his memory, so his narration careens from a Memento-like absence to a Being There type of simplicity.

This is a story of 9/11, or as Walter says in the interview included in my paperback edition, a story of 9/12. The author plays on all our shared images of that specific tragedy, while universalizing it by avoiding any specific references to the World Trade Towers or Ground Zero, which becomes simply The Zero. The president and the mayor (The Boss) remain nameless. The plot is complex, rendered more so by the memory gaps the reader shares with Remy, but handled with such grace by the author that you can actually follow it. Some of Remy's observations are mordantly funny, and some of the secondary characters, such as Remy's old partner Gutarek or his new colleague Markham, are wickedly satirical.

While the paranoiac and reactionary behavior of the government in the wake of 9/11 is the mainspring of the plot, the emotional punch comes from Remy's dazed and confused perspective in the wake of 9/11, his tenuous connection to what is left of reality, his suspected complicity in abandoning the ideals we are supposed to be defending. The book is cynical, but Remy remains an idealist -- an unhappy and ultimately defeated idealist.

I liked Citizen Vince and loved The Zero. I had bought the latter when it came out in paperback and had it sitting on my shelf for a couple of years. Of the three "9/11 books" I've read recently -- see my posts on Netherland and The Relucant Fundamentalist -- this is for me the one that really begins to plumb the depths of what it means. I went to a reading of Don DeLillo's at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square many years ago and asked him during the Q&A session why he wrote Libra. He said the real question is why did they shoot Kennedy. An author's task, he said, is to examine and render society's traumas, as DeLillo did with Libra and Walter does in this book.

I was in New York at Ground Zero shortly after 9/11 and so many of Walter's descriptions here capture the poignancy of the moment so well (Walter was working on assignment in New York at the time and saw much of the aftermath firsthand). His character laments at one point that by bulldozing away all the rubble the authorities robbed the battleground of its meaning and turned it into another hole in the ground. The subsequent controversy over the what to do with Ground Zero shows the truth of that.

Walter has since written The Financial Lives of the Poets, which seems intriguing, and has two earlier detective-type novels set in his home town of Spokane. Janet Maslin wrote of Walter in a New York Times Review that he was a "ridiculously talented writer" -- a blurb-writer's dream, but in this case an accurate description. I've gone from being a fan to being a devoted fan, and look forward to reading his other books.

A Most Wanted Man

This book appealed to me when I saw it in Politics & Prose because it is set in Hamburg, a city I lived in for two and half years and visited again for the first time in a long time in September. It is classic Le Carré -- smoke and mirrors, betrayal upon betrayal, a pervasive cynicism limned with the slightest glimmer of hopeless idealism.

But I'm still puzzling over Alan Furst's over-the-top praise for the book in his NYT Book Review piece, blurbed on the cover, that this is Le Carré's strongest, most powerful novel. It is certainly accomplished, but far from being his best novel. It is detached, almost passionless in its understatement, and much less moving than A Constant Gardener, which while technically not as perfect has an undercurrent of genuine passion and outrage, and characters that have more depth and humanity.

It is more a return to the gray world of espionage, but without the looming menace that Cold War espionage lent to both fiction and reality. The main protagonist, Tommy Brue, is a British merchant banker who is basically as flat as the characters in the earlier and now largely forgotten Single & Single. While Le Carré is clearly fascinated with the possibilities of a banker as hero, he has yet to find the right formula to make it work.

Brue, 60, in his futile love for a young, attractive lawyer is more pathetic than anything else. It is difficult to relate to any of the other characters in what is virtually an ensemble cast, in the way that one could relate to George Smiley, as remote as his world was to most of us. Brue is a pale shadow even of Harry Pendel in The Tailor of Panama, also pathetic but a good deal more complex and interesting. Annabel, the lawyer, scarcely emerges as anything more than an old man's fantasy.

For some reason, Le Carré felt obliged to be discursive about espionage and terrorism in a couple of long set pieces couched as briefing presentations by characters, including one whose only role was to make a discursive presentation. Why, really, when his showing already conveys the message so much better? Is he afraid we don't get it. Yes, Gardener had some of that, too, but the reader was more willing to forgive it because of the evident sense of outrage.

There is a hint of outrage here, but submerged in the ultimate sense of futility as all of the characters fatalistically play their roles in a scenario they know is doomed. There is little surprise in the denoument, either for the characters or the reader, though at least in the second half of the book the pace does carry you along easily enough.

There is also little sense of Hamburg, though Le Carré is clearly familiar with the city. But whereas he could convey a compelling sense of place when it is London or Berlin or even Bonn or Africa, there is no real sense of a specific location here. Perhaps Hamburg's charms are too subtle to figure in a drama of this type.

Despite the impressive blurbs and the NYT Bestseller emblazoned the bland cover, I was totally unaware of this book's existence until I saw it in the bookstore. Perhaps Furst overpraised it in the hopes that Le Carré would someday hype a book of his, though why Le Carré would feel the need to do that is a mystery.

One is reminded in these late Le Carré novels of late Picasso, where the artist could make a fortune signing his name to pieces still better than what most other painters were producing but not possessed of the same vitality and originality as his earlier work.

The author does succeed in transferring some of the moral ambiguity of his Cold War thrillers into the post-Cold War environment of the "war on terror." But, again, it seems to lack the menace or urgency of that earlier setting. The book is not a waste of time, but don't believe the hype.