The Book of Getting Even

In 1970 Gabriel Geismar travels from New Orleans to far away Swarthmore in hopes of escaping his domineering Rabbi father. By providential accident, Gabriel encounters fraternal twins Danny and Marghie Hundert in a communal dining hall; and while Marghie falls for Gabriel, it is he and Danny who enter into a love affair documented in a candid, though sensitive manner. Once Gabriel is taken home for summer vacation he ingratiates himself to the rest of the family, a Noble Prize winning scientist father and a cultured nurturing mother, who quickly become surrogate parents. As drawn by Taylor, the Hundert's represent a fantasy of domestic bliss, a familial wish come true: loving, attentive parents, sibling confidantes, and a lover always eager to please. There is an idyll created which intoxicates the reader: one wishes to enter the story and join this family (if only for an evening). The writing is both exceptionally wise and emotionally pure. Things fall apart. no family is perfect (though almost none is wholly past redemption or forgiveness). Old wounds heal, new wounds sting. People judge one another without have all the eveidence. Some suffer from with the burden of their secrets, while others are consumed by self-righteous anger. People grow up and learn to accept what life has to offer and make the best of it - or the worst of it. Parents, children, spouses and lovers - no one is exempt. Benjamin Taylor takes us on an odyssey of self-discovery in this coming of age novel. There is a huge story contained in this slim volume and an impressive fluidity in the telling of it. The final pages mange the miraculous in being both elegiac and cathartic. "The Book of Getting Even" is a tour de force.

Fleeing New Orleans and a despotic father, budding cosmologist Gabriel Geismar attends Swarthmore College in 1970 and meets twins Daniel and Marghie. The initial upshot is a hopeless love triangle, with Gabriel and Daniel together while Marghie is doomed to the sidelines, entertaining guests with her one-woman performances of classic movies. But a far more enduring relationship results when Gabriel meets the twins' Hungarian immigrant parents, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Grisha Hundert and his wife Lilo. In truth, the Hunderts' family dynamic is hardly the stuff of paradise: "The professor lectured Danny, but gave Marghie the benefit of the doubt. Mrs. Hundert did the reverse." An even more troubling undercurrent is Danny's mortification of his father's participation in the Manhattan Project three decades earlier; his ominous pacifism is as much oedipal as moral. Yet Gabriel has found a new home, and the Hunderts eagerly incorporate him into their cheerful if strained camaraderie and their inevitable heartbreak. A large number of supporting characters appear on the familial stage, but one deserves special mention: Ned Dunallen, the "fiction editor at a famously high-nosed magazine" that publishes authors suspiciously similar to Updike, Welty, and Nabokov. Those in the thick of New York literati will recognize Dunallen as the writer and editor William Maxwell disguised by the thinnest layer of cellophane; Dunallen's wife, like Emily Maxwell, was once involved with "the nation's best known movie critic ... a married man and drunkard and a law unto himself" [James Agee]. Melded effortlessly into the novel, this mini-biography is packed tight with catty gossip and bookish trivia and wink-wink references to Maxwell/Dunallen's sexual history ("That's a lap a girl can sit on, without fear or favor," quips Marghie), although I was left with the distracting feeling that there's a back-story here to which I wasn't privy. This synopsis doesn't even begin to do fairness to the world that Taylor crams into 166 magnificent pages--in fact, in spite of the author's larger-than-life portraits, achieved with lyrical pithiness, my one criticism is that the book is far too short. It's to the author's credit that I greedily rushed to the finish and was greedy for more.

Beautiful and dense prose brings this character-driven tale to life. The relationships the protagonist forms are original and real. I love how Taylor conveys the process by which Gabriel insinuates himself into the Hundert family -- it's both heart-warming and humorous.

This book will become part of your essence. It is smart, funny, touching, literate, literary, and compelling. The desire to turn pages to see what happens next is offset by the need to savor each sentence. (Best to plan on rereading.) Benjamin Taylor has written a book essential for anyone who wants to experience a piece of the latter part of the 20th Century while gazing into the depths of the universe and the eyes of an insect (you'll have to read the book to know what I mean).

This beautifully written novel, certain to win over readers and possibly a few prizes, movingly portrays the blessings as well as the burdens of adopting, as it were, the parents one wished for. Tracing ten years in the life of a young man from his freshman year at college to his emergence as a gifted star-gazer, The Book of Getting Even is best read the way one reads poetry, phrase by gorgeously crafted phrase. Its luminous final pages in particular reveal just how fine an artist Benjamin Taylor is. I could read him forever.