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4.0 out of 5 stars
"No trouble about my name before coming to Cambridge.", April 11, 2005
This review is from: The Education of Arnold Hitler (Paperback)
Focusing on the coming of age of Arnold Hitler, Marc Estrin follows Arnold's life from elementary school in Mansfield, Texas, in the late 1950s (where John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me, did his experiment in racism in 1960), through high school in the 1960s, Harvard University in the late 1960s, and the tumult of the post-Vietnam era in the 1970s. Here Estrin explores the nature of identity--how we find our true identities, how our identities are shaped by those around us, and how false perceptions of our identities are developed by others.
In his early years, Arnold was the most popular, most successful student in his class, and when he became a football star in a town that lived for football, his reputation and adulation were secured. It was not until he received a scholarship to Harvard, and exposure to a wider world, that he experienced, firsthand, the prejudice that black students, recently integrated into his Texas high school, had taken for granted. Jewish students would not share a room with him, and East Coast WASPs rejected him. His success in Mansfield did not carry over to Harvard, where his unfortunate name became more important than his identity.
Estrin describes in often hilarious detail the day to day life of Arnold Hitler, always connecting him to the history of the period--the Tet offensive, the Harvard occupation of the administration building by the Students for a Democratic Society, the professors who gave seminars on how to avoid the draft, the Watergate scandal, and the My Lai massacre. He meets fellow Harvard student Al Gore, MIT professor Noam Chomsky, and Leonard Bernstein, father of one of his girlfriends. After graduation, he goes to New York, where his "education" in life's realities continues.
Estrin's episodic novel could have been a great collection of interrelated short stories. His keen observation of the world around him casts light on the period and on the inherent racism and prejudice against "otherness" which dominated, and he analyzes the period with a scalpel. Arnold himself does not engender much empathy, however, and his crises do not feel very compelling since the simple expedient of changing his name would have avoided them. His "epiphanies" feel artificial, and his exploration of religion and cultural history feels like a fiction writer's construct to give broader scope to the novel. Readers unfamiliar with the period from the late sixties to late seventies may gain insight into a seminal period in American history; for those who lived through it, it may feel a bit stale. (3.5 stars) Mary Whipple
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3.0 out of 5 stars
He might as well be a cockroach: A warped-mirror sequel to Estrin's brilliant debut, July 24, 2010
This review is from: The Education of Arnold Hitler (Paperback)
"The Education of Arnold Hitler" is Marc Estin's follow-up to "Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa." His first book, which follows Kafka's human-roach as he witnesses and participates in world events from the beginning of World War I through the development of the bomb at Los Alamos, was tightly plotted and wittily written--and Estrin pulled off a hat trick of sorts: his readers fell in love with a cockroach.
It would normally be unfair to judge an author's book almost entirely by comparing it to his previous novel, but in this case "Arnold Hitler" is a warped-mirror image of Estrin's debut. Both books begin with the main character witnessing an assassination: Archduke Ferdinand in the first; John F. Kennedy in the later book. And like Gregor Samsa, the unfortunately named Arnold Hitler interacts with various famous personages, from Leonard Bernstein (whose daughter is one of Arnold's amours) to Al Gore, and he witnesses various historical events--in this case, during the Sixties and Seventies. Although Arnold is strikingly attractive, he is burdened by his name (with a name like Hitler, he might as well be a cockroach); he's a country-boy character done in by East Coast street smarts, intellectually eager but not very bright.
Although there are sections of the book that recall the cleverness of "Insect Dreams"; the most compelling portions of the book--Arnold's days as a college student, his interaction with his fellow students and the drama society, the satirical references to university social clubs--are well done. But these chapters are the core of a novel that Estrin should have written; overall the book's many episodes (Arnold's childhood in Texas, Arnold breaking up with his girlfriend in Oberlin, Arnold at Harvard, Arnold working at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Arnold associating with skinheads in the South Bronx) don't add up to a cohesive, convincing bildungsroman.
Several readers have compared this book to "Forrest Gump"--a fair, if unflattering, assessment. The dialogue-heavy prose has a chatty tone that often dumbs down the wit, the recurring jokes and farcical situations resulting from Arnold's surname become wearisome, and the passages describing the social turmoil of the Sixties read like they're copied from a textbook. Sadly, then, "Arnold Hitler" is little more than an anemic rehash of Estrin's stunning debut.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
An Interesting Picaresque, March 18, 2008
This review is from: The Education of Arnold Hitler (Paperback)
Arnold Hitler was raised in a town outside Dallas in the baby boom era, where apparently his surname didn't make a whole lot of difference to anyone until he got to Harvard, from which point on it was the scourge of his life. This factoid doesn't ring true to me, and it affected my enjoyment of this novel.
The novel works in three movements, one covering Arnold's parents meeting in Italy during World War II and ending with the end of his high school years; the second at Harvard from the late 60s to the early 70s and the last in New York in the year or so just after his graduation.
In the first movement, as stated, Arnold's surname is apparently irrelevant, as he witnesses the fight over school integration and the Kennedy assassination, and the triumphs and tribulations of high school love. He seems quite adrift, however, never really having much of a point of view; his strongest viewpoint seems to come from his decision to leave Texas and turn down numerous football scholarships (apparently at universities none of which cared about his surname in the slightest) to attend Harvard.
There, he participates in the Harvard Strike (but is denied entrance to University Hall because in the midst of the chaos of the protest the SDS doesn't want to risk headlines using his surname), can't get a date for much of his time in school (again, because of his surname) and starts acting in plays under a pseudonym (which would be impossible in a place as small as Harvard), where he falls in love with Leonard Bernstein's fictional daughter.
Left no money by his parents upon graduation, he ends up meeting a chess shark, who arranges his life in New York in the underworld (in one case literally) of the poor. Encountering Ariel Bernstein, though, he finds her father making a pass at him. Kicked out of his temporary housing in the Bowery, he ends up in an underpass under the Major Deagan Expressway next to the evocatively named Faile Street with an artist who makes her money as a stripper. He marries her at a wedding attended by the chess shark and his new lover, the former Music Director of the New York Philharmonic.
Parts of this book are well-written, and many are very evocative of the time and the place. Arnold's first girl friend and the way she both seduces and dumps him are sensitive and realistic. How Ariel got Arnold to spend a summer at Tanglewood by leading him on before she finally introduces him to her boyfriend is a cruel and manipulative scene that also rang true.
Other pieces of the book are hard to understand. His Jewish grandfather is still an Italian Jew; he speaks more like an Eastern European and trust me, there's a difference. He also, of course, speaks through Arnold's knee. How Arnold could have missed picking up the cultural themes that made the "Blasphemy" (a kosher hot dog wrapped in bacon and cheese) get its name is beyond me; Jewish culture would have been too pervasive at Harvard at the time for him to miss it. And his grandfather seems unconvinced that Hebrew National meets the laws of kashrut; trust me, they answer to higher authority. And it would have been impossible for a Harvard male student to guaranty that he could get into Whitman Hall when men first got to move to the Radcliffe Houses; the best he could have gotten was a chance to live in one of six South House dorms.
These are quibbles, though. The biggest problem is that so many opportunities just lay there. He was a witness to the Kennedy assassination, yet attending the same college as Kennedy nothing comes of that. He has a strong belief in desegregation, but Boston's racial segregation (which was a hot story during his time at Harvard) has no impact on him. He spends an entire year apparently with the name Hitler on the back of a Harvard football jersey with no visible impact, but the moment he quits football his name suddenly bars him from a social or political life. Someone needed to ask Estrin how he explained all that, because it leaves the reader baffled.
I enjoyed much of this novel, but in the end it wasn't better than three stars for all these reasons.
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