Customer Reviews

The Baker: A Novel

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The Baker is a rich, complex yet simple story of family love and the complexities of inter-racial as well as cross-cultural relationships. There are so many elements and relationships to think about...the son and his search for a nurtuting mother, the black friend/employee's place in the Bakers and his own family....a look at family business....crime, father-son love....and much more. It's so refreshing to read about characters thought processes while grapling with so many plot intricacies....Wonderful and memorable, thanks Paul Hond... please write more!!

Who amongst us has not bitten into a fresh loaf of well-baked bread - just bread- and not known what bliss is? In a neighborhood of halfed baked, over stylized, designer designed commercial publishing "doughs", The Baker is a standout. Rising like a "well-needed" examination of urban life with all its racial implications scattered like kimmel (seeds)between the slices, The Baker is utterly satisfying and totally filling. Thank you Paul Hond for enriching all my senses, and especially my appetite for good books.-

Hond's book has a profundity seldom found in fiction today. Racial and class conflict are illuminated brilliantly and sympathetically. The descriptions of the inner city, of suburban middle America, of the old French bakery, are vivid and fascinating. The characters likewise attain a lifelike status: at times, the reader feels as though they are real people she/he might know. This is most true of the title role, Mickey Lerner, trapped between the past and the future, as well as his son Benjamin, caught between Gen-X-dom, cold capitalistic ambition, and the child needing to be loved. Nelson is a little more of a type, the boy-trying-to-escape-the-ghetto. Though there are points where the story seems to lag, the plotting is superb overall; subplot is used to good effect. Hond's prose flows like poetry!

Paul Hond's The Baker is a powerful and surprising first novel. Hond draws the world of Mickey Lerner, who runs a kosher bakery in Baltimore on the border between a Jewish neighborhood and a crime-ridden black neighborhood. He surrounds Lerner with solid, fully-drawn characters, complete with flaws, prejudices, and insecurities: Emilie, his cool French violinist wife; his undirected eighteen-year old son Benjie; Nelson, the teenaged, black driver for the bakery; and Donna, Nelson's gentle and voluptuous mother in whom Mickey sees the softness Emilie lacks. Tribalism and the temptation and hazards of crossing tribal boundaries permeate The Baker-the clannishness of Hond's working-class Jews; the mutual suspicion in the novel's black/white relationships; and Mickey's strained relationship with Emilie, who is ever the outsider looking in even after two decades in the U.S. Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities quickly comes to mind, not only because of the common theme of urban race relations but more importantly because Hond shares Wolfe's gift of creating the voices of his characters, complete with dialect, accent, and cadence, and his use of voice to position his characters in society. Hond also adapts his style to capture his characters' emotions: Benjie's thoughts flow into Faulknerian run-ons during a moment of panic about Emilie's distance, Mickey's dialogue of incomplete sentences during a tormented trip of self-discovery to Paris. The plot is as surprising as Hond's craft is deft. Hond creates a world of violence-physical aggression and abrupt decisions. Each plot turn comes as a complete surprise, such that the reader fully shares the characters' sense of shock. Because communication is more of a void than a bridge among Hond's characters, Mickey, Emilie, and Benjie announce decisions to one another, then leave the other to decipher the meaning. Emilie, in particular, is an enigma, and the deeply self-doubting Mickey and Benjie struggle to comprehend her distance. Hond's Baker also teems with passion, sensuousness, and food. The pivotal moments of Mickey's life are marked by bread and pastry, beginning with the beautifully-drawn explosive, first sexual encounter between Mickey and Emilie on the flour-covered bakery worktable. If The Baker has one weakness, it is that the sexual imagery of food is at times heavy-handed.

An urban morality play that is raised to the level of myth. There is a lot of emotional power in this book, and also many truthful social observations that make it seem as though these are real people in real situations. Though the racial aspect of the conflict in this book is certainly important, what is most powerful is the moving depiction of a good man trying to overcome his failings. I don't want to analyze the plot because it wouldn't be fair to give away the suprises in the story. But suffice to say, there is a lot going on here, from the relationships between the protagonist, Mickey, and all the other characters--his wife, his son, a black employee and the employee's mother--to the boxing sequences and also the section in Paris, which is filled with sensuous descriptions about bread and baking. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys good writing and a good story.

"A debut novel that transforms the terror of working class, inner city race relations into an upbeat examination of love, loss and father-son bonding. Set in Baltimore, Hond's appraisal of the cultural and economic barriers that isolate blacks and Jews recalls the bitter tragedies of Dreiser and Malamud. Mickey Lerner, a robust middle-aged Jewish bakery store owner, is alienated from his wife, Emi, a French concert violinist who no longer sees in him the integrity that once attracted her. Meanwhile, their 18 year old underacheiving son, Ben, spends most of his time shooting hoops and fooling around with Nelson Childs, the bakery's delivery boy. We learn that Mickey, a former boxer, gave up fighting after his baker father died of a heart attack, and that Mickey's last, deadly fight was against Nelson's grandfather, whose brains were literally knocked out by the young Mickey. Upon meeting his former opponent's daughter and Nelson's mother, Donna, a single parent and beautiful, spirited, warm and earthy woman, Mickey become sexaully attracted to her. Donna is everything his cold and distant wife, Emi is not. Mickey's life changes drastically when Emi and he are robbed by a pair of masked Black youths who panic and shoot and kill Emi. At first the tragedy makes everything worse: Grief-striken Mickey takes off for Paris in search of secrets in his wife's past, leaving Ben in charge of the bakery. And as a boss, Ben can't cope with Nelson, who buckles under the humiliating treatment he gets from bigoted customers. Fortunately, Hond wisely doesn't let his tale torch to a violent climax but, instead, lets his characters find each other again as they uncover their hidden strengths. Fresh, optimistic, and sophisticated enough to satisfy on many levels"Kirkus."Paul Hond has written a searching, inquistive, deeply mature novel that illuminates and enobles a spectrum of human experience, from racism to friendship to love. His insight,always surprising, is carried on prose as original and incisive as that of any other writer I know, and his characters are as dimensional, unexpected and real as only a bron writer can producer" Neil Gordon"This is an astonishing debut, especially from such a young man...a huge contribution to the growing literature by a young generation of American Jewish writers." Carla Cohen, Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington,D.C."Hond probes the Black-Jewish relations in a crime ridden urban neighborhood with an emotional depth, power and lyricsim that signal an auspicious debut" Publisher's Weekly"In the classic tradition of storytellers like Anne Tyler, Annie Prouxl, John Casey, Mordechai Richler, James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and David Gutterson, Paul Hond has written a story of ordinary people, who become transformed by the outside forces that intrude on their isolated lives. Hond elevates a middle class Baltimore baker, his unhappy and unmotivated teenage son, a Black inner city youth and his struggling yet dignified mother, into characters who leap off the page into a reader's hearts and minds. THE BAKER can be compared in emotional depth and literary skill to the works of such OPRAH BOOK CLUB SELECTIONS LIKE:: THE MAP OF THE WORLD by Ruth Hamilton, ELLEN FOSTER and A VIRTUOUS WOMAN by Kaye Gibbons, SHE'S COME UNDONE by Wally Lamb, BEORE WOMEN HAD WINGS by Connie Mae Fowler, and SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS by David Gutterson. THE BAKER is a wonderful gift, especially for Mother's Day -- buy a fresh loaf of bread and wrap it up with THE BAKER, a novel by the fresh new voice of Paul Hond! What could be better than enjoying the stuff of life - bread and the stuff of dreams - a book?!" Barbara Zitwer