Captives [Hardcover]

Todd Hasak-Lowy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 2008

Daniel Bloom will either fix our broken world in his imagination or destroy his real life trying.

A sniper is taking down suits and politicians—in Daniel Bloom’s head.

Bloom is the kind of guy who ends most social gatherings with an alternately raging and despairing conversation about The State of the World. And recently things have taken a turn for the worse. His marriage is on the rocks, his teenage son is becoming increasingly unknowable, and his sense of hopeless impotence has reached a stage of spiritual crisis that's no longer a matter of vapid dinner-party conversation.

So he decamps to his home office to work on his fifteenth screenplay, this time about a federal agent and a nameless assassin. The assassin is a sniper who targets the power elite: corporate chiefs who defraud their employees of billions of dollars in pensions, and political flacks who've rigged the system in their own favor. Only the federal agent isn't sure he wants to capture the sniper.

Soon Bloom realizes that his screenplay hits too close to home: He really does want these people dead, so much so that this revenge fantasy takes over his life, sending him in search of salvation in an outrageous mentor, a possibly dangerous foreign country, and, finally, his very own backyard.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hasak-Lowy, author of a well-received short story collection, The Task of This Translator (2005), struggles in his debut novel, set primarily in Los Angeles. Daniel Bloom, a successful screenwriter, has trouble relating to his wife and son. As his family life crumbles, Bloom conceives a new movie idea: a nameless assassin who kills all those we love to hate-greedy CEOs, two-faced politicians, peddlers of questionable influence and various symbols of unearned privilege. It's not lost on Bloom that his brainstorm mirrors the anger and emptiness of his own life. The novel's tight setup, however, quickly unravels in a mire of half-developed characters, a baffling trip to Israel and descriptive passages and stretches of dialogue that serve little purpose. What saves the story is Bloom's wry wit and social commentary. He's a 21st-century man-in-crisis, an appealing character whose plight is, unfortunately, far too drawn out.

From Booklist

Hollywood screenwriter Daniel Bloom is always beastly while working on his complex thrillers, but this time he is heading for a spiritual crisis. As his son’s bar mitzvah looms, Daniel is struggling with an incendiary tale of revenge fueled by his “intractable rage” at those responsible for the broken world his son will inherit. Egged on by his eccentric agent and a radical rabbi, Daniel goes to Israel, where he is overwhelmed by the intensity of life lived under the constant threat of annihilation. In his barbed, farcical, and ambitious first novel, Hasak-Lowy, author of the story collection, The Task of This Translator (2005), taps into the corrosive feeling of helplessness permeating American life as the Iraq War burns on and the economy caroms toward disaster. Hasak-Lowy’s bold comedy of conscience is alluring, clever, and mordantly funny. Too bad it staggers under the weight of its serious concerns. Still, it’s a nervy and righteous skewering of greed, hypocrisy, and complacency, and striking testimony to the perverse fact that we never learn the awful truth about lies and war. --Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038552773X
• ISBN-13: 978-0385527736
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,330,354 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing and shallow, January 5, 2009

By 

mark jabbour (Westminster, Colorado) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Captives (Hardcover)

Halfway through this book I was debating: four or five stars. When I finished it, it was between two and three. That's not good. It was an ambitious project but falls short ... all the way to disappointing and shallow. I think Hasak-Lowy wrote it to soon, meaning--before he knew what he was speaking of. Maybe when he's fifty or sixty years old, he'll have a better idea. Good writing is not something, I think, that can be taught in school. The author is a professor of literature which seems to be very much in vogue--the teaching of creating writing and subsequently, the teacher then must publish a novel(s). They tend to get cute with style, and Hasak-Lowy does that. [eg. He takes seventy-one (71) words to say:"Each ... moment ... feels like a month."] But, that was bearable, as were the dropped dialogue tags. It was the disintegration of promising scenes and story that was so disappointing. There is so much potential here--the current state of affairs in the world--the intersection of writing with the "here now" real world. I'd like to tell the author to go back to school, but formal education is not what he lacks--what he lacks is insight and introspection. That said, there are some good descriptive scenes and SOME good dialogue.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Coming to terms with his pain in a numbed and Botoxed city, October 17, 2008

By 

Libby Cone "author of War on the Margins" (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Captives (Hardcover)

It is fitting that this book should come out in the season of Sukkot,
when Jews have finished baring our souls during the High Holy Days and
then repair to our flimsy booths in the fields, celebrating the harvest
while acknowledging our ultimate vulnerability when faced with the
Eternal. Daniel Bloom, a screenwriter whose obsession with storytelling
threatens his marriage and family, lives in the anomic LA of Didion,
trying to find some "meaning in his life," one of the euphemisms for
coming face-to-face with his fear and pain. His journey is aided by the
similarly wounded Rabbi Ethan Brenner, whose candor doesn't fly in
La-La-land, and gets him fired from his Reform Temple. Hasak-Lowy's long, loping paragraphs describe Bloom's
frustration with the state of the world, as well as with his personal
life, following him through an abbreviated tour of Tel Aviv with one of
Rabbi Ethan's friends as his guide. Even during a memorial service,
Bloom can only use the terms of film to think about his outward
deportment: "...disturbed by the thought, What's my motivation here?
Obviously it isn't about him [the deceased]," until he finally is able
to touch his own anguish and shame. The metaphor of a dying dog is a bit
overdone at the book's conclusion, as is the final treatment of Bloom's
work, but the book overall sings the plaintive song of imperfect humans
trying to fix an imperfect world while also trying to fix the
disrepair of their own lives, while wondering if some aspect of the
Infinite could be watching.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Coming to terms with his pain in a numbed and Botoxed city, October 17, 2008

By 

Libby Cone "author of War on the Margins" (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Captives (Kindle Edition)

It is fitting that this book should come out in the season of Sukkot,
when Jews have finished baring our souls during the High Holy Days and
then repair to our flimsy booths in the fields, celebrating the harvest
while acknowledging our ultimate vulnerability when faced with the
Eternal. Daniel Bloom, a screenwriter whose obsession with storytelling
threatens his marriage and family, lives in the anomic LA of Didion,
trying to find some "meaning in his life," one of the euphemisms for
coming face-to-face with his fear and pain. His journey is aided by the
similarly wounded Rabbi Ethan Brenner, whose candor doesn't fly in
La-La-land, and gets him fired from his Reform Temple. Hasak-Lowy's long, loping paragraphs describe Bloom's
frustration with the state of the world, as well as with his personal
life, following him through an abbreviated tour of Tel Aviv with one of
Rabbi Ethan's friends as his guide. Even during a memorial service,
Bloom can only use the terms of film to think about his outward
deportment: "...disturbed by the thought, What's my motivation here?
Obviously it isn't about him [the deceased]," until he finally is able
to touch his own anguish and shame. The metaphor of a dying dog is a bit
overdone at the book's conclusion, as is the final treatment of Bloom's
work, but the book overall sings the plaintive song of imperfect humans
trying to fix an imperfect world while also trying to fix the
disrepair of their own lives, while wondering if some aspect of the
Infinite could be watching.