Meeting in 1929 on the brink of adolescence, four children who were raised in isolation by a widowed mother grow into young men and women whose lives are marked by incest, homosexuality, and celibacy.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The chasm between appearance and reality, between expectations and disillusionment, is the theme of Grumbach's latest novel, whose dark message emerges from the unfulfilled sexual identities of her four characters. None of the four preadolescent youngsters who meet during the summer of 1929 in the town of Far Rockaway, N.Y., will achieve a happy life. Caleb and Kate Flowers, raised by their widowed, reclusive mother in the beachside community, are propelled by their pleasantly claustrophobic existence and their "twinned sensibility" to be best friends, and later, innocent explorers of each other's bodies. The fathers of Roslyn Hellman and Lionel Schwartz are wealthy Manhattan stockbrokers who will soon lose their jobs and money in the stock market crash. Grumbach (Coming Into the End Zone) follows these characters episodically during the ensuing 15 years, "in which the nadir of financial ruin and depression reached the zenith of war and prosperity." Their lives, however, never reach a comparable high point. When Caleb and Lionel meet again at Cornell, they recognize their homosexual bond, but Caleb sunders their relationship out of fear that disclosure might ruin his career. Roslyn gets the first glimmers of her lesbian predilection at summer camp (these scenes ring with authenticity), but society confines her to a conventional path. Kate, unable to break her incestuous bond with her brother, subsumes her sexuality in religion. Grumbach tells her story in laconic prose that is most successful in the beginning section, which reads like a fable, but later lapses into some awkwardness (the overuse of the phrase "could bear no longer") and some sledgehammer moralizing. As an honest portrayal of self-realization sacrificed to social conventions, however, the book has a visceral impact.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Grumbach's latest novel is grimly compelling in its portrayal of four lives filled with stifled desires, major depression, incest, self-sacrifice, and thwarted love. The four meet as children in the summer of 1929 in the Long Island beach town, Far Rockaway. Caleb and Kate Flowers, sheltered by their widowed mother, encounter two children of the "summer people," Lionel Schwartz and his playmate from New York City, the intelligent, domineering Roslyn Hellman. As the quartet swims and croquets through the summers and pubescence, Grumbach paints a glowing picture of warmth, security, and safety that is shattered by the Great Depression. Ultimately, societal constraints on sexual expression, not financial reversals, prove the undoing of the four, who, though creative and imaginative, are caught in a whirlpool of homosexual and incestuous love yet find no long-lasting outlet for their obstructed passions. With death at an early age presented as a happy alternative to living inauthentically, this is a ruthlessly ugly depiction of interwar America that emphasizes the tragedy of lives lost to tradition and convention. Whitney Scott
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By A Customer
This review is from: The Book of Knowledge: A Novel (Hardcover)
"The Book of Knowledge" takes its title from the timeworn encyclopedia of the same name, and its style reflects a nostalgia redolent of cracking a musty encyclopedia long untouched on a grandfather's shelf. It is a novel set during the 1920s through the 1940s, and chronicles the lives of four youths through crucial incidents in their lives. Stories with children as protagonists are inherently fraught with twin dangers, one, that of adopting the unripened perspective of childhood to such a degree that the prose seems precious, or two, that the characters are drawn from such an adult perspective that they don't seem recognizable as children. Grumbach avoids both dangers, and it is testament to her skills as a novelist that her most convincing passages in this book are those which convey the moments of discovery and innocence lost with such precision and delicacy that her characters seem utterly, convincingly, real. This despite the fact that there are some mannerisms that are distracting; perhaps owing to the period in which the novel is set, Grumbach resorts to such occasional rhetorical conceits like "So it was that..." which intrude upon the reader as artificial. But these incidences are minor, and one finishes this novel with a sense of empathy, and with a vividness of shared experience with her troubled characters
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