Customer Reviews

The First Desire: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"The First Desire" is an amazing well-written, controlled book, with rich layers of characterization.

What does it mean to remain loyal to your family? What part of you would you have to hide in order to remain so? Or would you be more inclined to disappear all together? This book takes a look at each member of the Cohen family and how they deal with their own familial ties. After the death of her mother, eldest daughter Goldie Cohen disappears. Her father believes she is dead, and if she isn't in reality, she is to him, so he holds shiva; Jo lives her entire life afraid to claim her sexuality; Sadie who lives her life in the ways she'd expected wonders at the end if she's chosen wisely; and Irving, a gambling man who can't settle down with one woman lives a double life: one his family can approve and one that feels closer to who he is. Finally, there's Celia, the slightly unstable, fragile member of the family whom everyone works hard to protect.

Reviewed by Colleen Hollister for Small Spiral Notebook

First Desire has a soft and subtle lyricism of language that is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf at her best. But all of that has been said.

This is a story about five adult siblings, their father, their Buffalo neighbors, and their late mother, whose absence is so palpable that she is a character herself. This is a simple framework, and a potentially simple story, about family and relationships. From the beginning, each character commands its own individual personality but also falls into place as a member of the family. Sadie is the capable young wife; Celia the fragile and childlike sister; Jo the brusque and independent one; Irving the youngest, fond of gambling, drinking and women. Their father, Abe Cohen, owns a successful jewelry store. Each member cannot possibly escape - they are all interlinked, one member described by the next, one responsible to another. Oldest sister Goldie, however, has tried to pull herself away. This is the image that opens the novel: Sadie standing in her front window, luxuriating in the quiet morning, watching Irving stride up her lawn to tell her Goldie is missing. This event sets up a ripple effect, touching every action and thought in a family already shaken from loss.

At first glance this is a novel about women, flowers, tea. Her characters reveal their emotions through attacks on rose wallpaper and descriptions of clouds. As a novel, The First Desire is slow and unexciting. Most of the plot is laid out from the beginning, and there are few developments the reader would not have expected. But this is a writerly book, and the writing and structure serve to entrance the reader better than a dramatic plot would. Each chapter settles in the point of view of a single character and this circling from one character to another and then back creates a repetition that holds the novel together. The fact that many chapters have appeared in literary journals attests to their tight construction - they can stand on their own, and are thus complete stories in themselves.

Thus focused, the work hones in on its central problem, what Reisman calls the fight between two "desires": the first the need to be connected to loved ones, to be recognized, accepted and comforted; the second to be invisible, independent, to hide. Goldie has successfully hidden herself, but the family suffers. Such a complicated problem creates a complicated, layered novel, told in pieces of time, pieces of consciousness, all woven together like strands of fine silk thread.

The writing is so suited to the subject that Reisman's world, its problems and its emotions, stand fully upright in their vividness. The novel is infused with sadness, attuned to changes in the weather. The words are lush, paragraphs given the texture of a soft cashmere sweater. The time period, the late 1920s through the 1950s, is clearly evoked, using appropriate words like "davenport", without feeling heavy or dated. Accordingly, Buffalo is not just a setting, but a feeling, one solid piece of the novel's tone, much like the jigsaw puzzles Celia works to calm her distracted mind.

The reader is drawn in by the novel's many pieces and how intricately they fit together. At Reisman's hand, what could be a simple story turns into an exposition of the many possible layers of sadness and loneliness, an exploration of what it means to be a family.

Nancy Reisman is by no means an amateur, and The First Desire is, undoubtedly, a novel that lives up to its promise.

For those readers who are only content with action novels, this is not a novel that will satisfy. But for those who enjoy characters who unfold and come to life and haunt you for days -- weeks! -- to come, The First Desire is a novel to be read and savored.

In essence, the First Desire is about how a family can sustain and at the same time, destroy us..how our internal vistas end up exploding into the harsh glare of reality. While reading this novel, I kept wondering: "How can someone as young as Nancy Reisman "get" what life was like in the 1920s and 1930s and recreate it so convincingly? How can she breathe life into these characters so beautifully?" It's the novelist's skill, and she does it to near perfection.

These are not one dimensional characters and there's not a false move here. Anyone who has ever explored the minefields of family life (and that's about 99% of us), will find something to relate to. I felt as if I knew these characters, their confusions and frustrations, as they muddled through. With the wealth of intimate details, these characters are very, very real.

It's July 1929. Sadie lounges, enjoying a serene morning in her own home --- until her brother Irving arrives with the news that their sister has disappeared. The missing sister, Goldie, was the oldest sibling who ran the household after the death of their mother and also worked at the library. She always had been so reliable.

No one can explain why or how Goldie vanished. Yet the family members living at home hesitate when Sadie questions them about her last days there. One of the sisters, Jo, doesn't tell Sadie her own viewpoint concerning Goldie's disappearance. Goldie had been wandering and dreamy. In Jo's opinion, a man was surely involved. She can't quite decide how to feel about her sister's absence: is fear the appropriate emotion? Jo longs for her mother, who would have known the proper frame of mind for the family mystery.

Their father has taken up with a woman of whom no one (except Irving) approves. The father's reaction to Goldie's absence horrifies the remaining family members. He insists on sitting shivah for her, although it is a declaration of her death, which has never been proven. According to Sadie, "You can't erase a person, though her father in his rage will try." When the time comes, the sisters excuse themselves from the ceremony. Instead of donating Goldie's clothing to charity, the women hide them in the attic.

The plot follows the family from 1929 to 1950, with flashbacks lending back-story. One by one, the family members' stories are told, back and forth, braiding them together into intricate patterns of personalities and relationships. Sadie has the affluent life she has always wanted, with two daughters and an attentive husband. Yet she wonders what she's missing. Jo falls in love with a female co-worker, and into heartbreak. Irving, the sisters' only brother, has a huge secret he guards from his sisters and father. Meanwhile, Irving continues to pilfer from his family in order to gamble until he heads off to war. The atrocities he views affect Irving strongly, yet he returns to his old ways when he comes home from the war. And sister Celia is as odd as she always has been --- following handsome strangers, making scenes in public places, and refusing to bathe. We also learn the bittersweet story of their father's lover, Lillian, who is an integral character in the story.

Debut novelist Nancy Reisman paints gorgeously haunting descriptions: a man's overcoat is "like an unbuttoned pelt"; a father has gone to work during a family tragedy "leaving a pale gray blur in his place." The characters and their stories are subtle and real. Just as in real life, there are no stereotyped personalities and no overly neat conclusions. The story draws readers in until they feel absorbed into the Cohen family. This engrossing and satisfying novel is the perfect companion for a rainy afternoon in front of the fire while sipping tea.

--- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon

Nancy Reisman poses an important question in her provocative, if sometimes overwritten, debut novel, "The First Desire': What do we really want out of life? Reisman examines this question through the experiences of one family, grappling with the aftershocks of the sudden and unexpected disappearance of its oldest daughter. Each character confronts the issue, and in those confrontations, reveals the core components of his or her personality. It is Reisman's contention that we don't know ourselves well enough to act on our desires, and, as a result, we tend to live in illusion and seek to escape life's possibilities.

Set in Buffalo and spanning a generation (from 1929 to the immediate post World War II era), "The First Desire" chronicles the Cohens' response to an event that signals the erosion of an already overstretched family fabric. After assuming the caretaking responsibilities for her terminally-ill mother and unwillingly shouldering maternal obligations as well, Goldie simply vanishes. Though Goldie's resentments are demonstrably obvious and her resentment at a restrictive, meaningless existence palpable, her family is strangely oblivious to the possibility that Goldie simply may have fled. Her father, the grimly responsible Abe Cohen, quickly sits shiva and washes his hands of her. With a jeweler's quiet efficiency, he literally and figuratively buries his wife and daughter. Once he puts aside death, Abe separates himself from his remaining three daughters and sole son and devotes himself to his work and his frantic, passionate but sterile pursuit of romance. His is a singularly unfeeling man, whose carefully-maintained veneer cracks only after his unwanted confrontation with the Holocaust.

Abe's children prove to be the most interesting characters in "The First Desire." Each faces the absence of the family's true symbol of strength; they must discover an answer to what it is they want out of life. Of the remaining four, Sadie assumes moral responsibility for finding her sister. She subordinates other desires and determines to live an ordinary bourgeois life, never straying too far from the lines, always careful to maintain proper appearances, often bewildered as to how life seems to have swallowed her. She ruefully acknowledges "what she once wanted is not necessarily what she wants now." Despite her functional marriage and competent motherhood, her "desire often slides to the periphery, or beyond, into murk."

Murk is where her brother, Irving, lives. Pilfering money from his father's business or cadging change from Sadie, the sybaritic Irving never musters the courage to live life. He retreats to faceless trysts with nameless partners, shuns the possibilities of genuine affection and lives in a twilight world of burlesque houses, poker nights and false identities. One of the middle sisters, Jo, exudes frustration and suffers the consequences of a sterile, repressed life. Sexually frustrated (and perhaps a closet lesbian) and yoked to her developmentally-disabled sister Celia, Jo lacks the instinct to even nibble at life. Instead, she burns with resentments...anger over her unwelcome responsibilities to care for Celia and her father, despair over an absolute lack of possibilities and bewilderment over how little control she has of life. She is genuinely lost.

Reisman offers believable insights into the lives of the Cohens; her portraits are sensitive, compassionate and believable. However, when she strays from the narrative and focuses on minor characters (Abe's mistress, Lillian, receives far too much attention), "The First Desire" loses traction. Reisman's detailed descriptions of the Cohens' physical environment veer dangerously into excess, and much of the family's angst is repetitive. The novel's braided chapters, written from a family member's perspective, occasionally hinder the plot's continuity.

Despite these weaknesses, "The First Desire" showcases talent. Nancy Reisman boldly stakes out psychological terrain that is difficult to navigate. Her characters, uncomfortably flawed and frightfully ill-equipped to deal with the centrifugal impact of Goldie's disappearance, remind us that regardless of the vicissitudes of life, we have an obligation to discover our first desire.

And you thought your family has problems well you have not met the Cohen's. We have Abe, who doesn't even acknowledge his girlfriend's existance even after his wife died. Then he's eldest daughter they think died but we dion't even know why everyone thinks she's dead. The father decides to have a shiva without a body. Then Lillian who stays with Abe and doesn't marry even til the very end. You have Sadie who wants to tell everyone how to live. Goldie, she is the smart one she was the caretaker til she realized what she was in for and left.
Jo who is a lesbian and has a woman she is attracted to get fired. Celia, who has to be taken care of. Irving, who is the womanizer, theif and fake. What would you do. I think I would do the same as Goldie and leave town.
Our book club discussed this book. We all agreed ( we are a jewish book club). But this was not about being jewish but the family and character dynamics. It made you want to know why they didn't get committed. But, it made you feel and go with the emotion of each character. For example Sadie was giving birth but during that time you actually felt her pain and agony and you wanted to strangle Bill's mother neck too.

I was so disappointed by this book! It came highly recommended by two different people who said they just couldn't put it down. I was so hopeful about this book that I bought it new rather than borrowing it. Based on what I had heard and read, I was sure I would love it.

It was set in a time period and culture that I am particularly interested in but it left me flat. There were so many loose ends and little character development. I just didn't CARE about most of the characters. There truly was a GOOD story in there but it just didn't work for me. I was interested in Lillian, Abe's mistress, but she kept coming and going until she was gone with NO explanation.

There was just no color in the characters for me and I'm sorry it was my selection for my book group.

I was very disappointed in this book. The subject matter had great promise but failed to live up to it. This is a family story that takes place in Buffalo,NY. There are four adult sisters and one adult brother. The head of the family is a recently widowed father. It starts with the disappearance of one sister. The story then introduces the rest of the family, and their reaction to the disappearance. I felt the characters never reached a fullness so that I could care about them. There were a lot of words to the story and sometimes they made no sense. The one character that I enjoyed and could almost root for was the father's girlfriend. She was a woman with a jaded past but she was flesh and blood and I cared how things would work out for her. Nobody else in the family liked her. Family stories are one of my favorite story lines but this one did not satisfy my appetite.

I enjoyed learning about all the characters in the book, but I didn't see a theme. Getting to know this family was interesting, but I couldn't fathom what the author's message was, if, indeed, there was a message. Not understanding the purpose left one frustrated at the end.

This book is a string of characters thoughts with nothing of interest to hold it together. You don't identify with any of the characters as they are all shallow, wallowing in the wind, not knowing what they believe or want in life. What a true bore and waste of time.