Jewish Literary Review

Posted on May 29, 2008 by Steve Pollak

Benjamin Taylor: getting ‘even’ in his second novel

Benjamin Taylor’s new novel, “The Book of Getting Even,” came out earlier this month and it has received mostly good reviews.

For those of you who are not familiar with Taylor, he won accolades from the Jewish and gay communities for his 1995 novel “Tales Out of School,” a coming-of-age tale about a prominent Jewish family living in turn-of-the-century Galveston Island.

The book was recognized by Gay Chicago magazine as one of the 10 best novels of 1995. In addition, Taylor received Hadassah Magazine’s 1996 Harold U. Ribalow Prize for outstanding Jewish fiction.

His new book is also a coming-of-age tale, this time focusing on the son of a New Orleans rabbi growing up in the 1970s. Gabriel Geismar is a brilliant, homosexual mathematician who goes to Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia and meets twins Daniel and Marghie Hundert, the children of (the fictitious) Nobel Prize–winning physicist Gregor Hundert, one of a group of prominent Hungarian-Jewish scientists who emigrated to America and worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the bomb. Marghie loves Gabriel but Gabriel loves Danny who apparently does not love Gabriel but becomes obsessed with activism and protesting against the war in Vietnam.

In a review published last week in Ha’Aretz, writer Sarah Wildman called the book ‘a major achievement’ and praised Taylor’s ability to create ‘richly drawn’ characters:

The Hunderts and even their closest friends, Ned and Elise Dunallen, are richly drawn, with well-drawn back stories that explain late-in-life idiosyncrasies, as though to say: Indeed, these adults were once just as crazy, just as loose and carefree in their time. Only Gabriel’s poor parents are left behind, slightly more than two-dimensional, not quite three.

Yet despite this, the book is a major achievement, a strong smart book that is defined by ethnic American identity — Jewish, yes, but also Hungarian and American; intellectual, literary, and scientific. This is a picture of a small, bounded world, which becomes more and more porous as the 1970s wear on, a group of people who bear the impact of the 20th century, and then live mostly regular small lives.

Over at the Boston Globe, critic and editor Amanda Heller also praised the book’s character set:

War and peace, the fracturing of generations, the sexual revolution and its casualties – with irony and pathos this beautifully written novel treats the defining themes of an era, filtered through the restless, eccentric intelligence of a striking cast of characters.

Like I said, most of the reviews have been positive. The folks at Kirkus, however, called the book ‘inconsequential:’

Taylor’s second novel … is an inconsequential story, with considerable pretensions, about a brainy gay Jewish astronomy student, his brainy best friends (twins) and their super-brainy parents.

You can decide for yourself. The National Book Critics Circle ran an excerpt of the book on their blog back in January. You can find it here.

For those of you who enjoy Taylor’s writing, you’ll be glad to know he’s working on two new projects. He will be the editor of Saul Bellow: Letters, scheduled for publication in November 2010. In addition, he’s writing a travel memoir, Naples Declared, which will be published in 2010.

“The Book of Getting Even,” is published by Steerforth (176 pages).

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