The Book of Getting Even: A Novel [Hardcover]

Benjamin Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 20, 2008

Son of a rabbi, budding astronomer Gabriel Geismar is on his way from youth to manhood in the 1970s when he falls in love with the esteemed and beguiling Hundert family, different in every way from his own. Over the course of a decade-long drama unfolding in New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and the Wisconsin countryside, Gabriel enters more and more passionately and intimately into the world of his elective clan, discovering at the inmost center that he alone must bear the full weight of their tragedies, past and present. Yet The Book of Getting Even is funny and robust, a novel rich in those fundamentals we go to great fiction for: the exploration of what is hidden, the sudden shocks, the feeling at last of life laid bare.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this delightful, character-driven coming-of-age novel, Gabriel Geismar grows up in mid–20th-century New Orleans as the only son of a rabbi, maturing into a brilliant, homosexual mathematician who is out of sync with his father's values. At Swarthmore in 1970, Gabriel meets the twins Daniel and Marghie Hundert, the children of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Gregor Hundert, one of the so-called Hungarian Eight who emigrated to America and worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the bomb. Fascinated by the stately, Old World professor and his kindly wife, Lilo, and deeply attached to Marghie, a cinema-obsessed vegetarian, and to Daniel, an angry counterculture figure, Gabriel spends the summer with the family at their Wisconsin retreat, which yields cherished conversation and understanding. As Gabriel departs to study astrophysics at the University of Chicago, the tempo of Daniel's activism builds, and Marghie begins running a movie house. When the once great professor sinks into senile dementia, Lilo makes a necessary but terrible decision for them all. The editor of Saul Bellow's forthcoming letters, Taylor turns in a smart, humane look at what Gabriel calls the era's intergenerational rancor. (May)
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From The New Yorker

Gabriel Geismar, the embattled protagonist of Taylor’s excellent second novel, is the son of a domineering rabbi growing up in nineteen-fifties New Orleans. Homosexual, suffering from a physical deformity (he has a supernumerary thumb), and enthralled by mathematics—"calculability, sweet detachment from the corporeal universe"—Gabriel has "a furious craving for other, nobler origins." In college, he meets Marghie and Danny Hundert, whose famous physicist father is one of his heroes, and adopts the family as his own. The book explores the tortured and often misguided process by which children attempt to define themselves in relation to their parents (one iteration of the "getting even" of the title), a process from which Danny and Marghie, as Gabriel slowly discovers, are not exempt. Taylor captures their quests for identity in pitch-perfect dialogue and lengthy meditative passages; his elegant plotting feels at once deliberate and improvised.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth (May 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586421433
• ISBN-13: 978-1586421434
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.8 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,909,815 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The raising up and casting down" of an American family, July 30, 2008

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D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Book of Getting Even: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Essential Book, June 6, 2008

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Latte - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of Getting Even: A Novel (Hardcover)

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).

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing little novel, July 21, 2008

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Orange Shelves "Orange Shelves" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of Getting Even: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.