Farbman is a hustling New York lawyer with a shiska wife and two kids, living beyond his financial and emotional means. Dunned by his creditors and distressed by an undiagnosed malaise of the soul, Farbman embodies the conflict between our altruistic impulse to help others and our selfish desire to elbow our way to the front of the line. The novel begins on Forty-Second Street in New York City. Farbman is on his way to an out-of-town funeral. He is rushing from a meeting with his unforgiving banker, to his chaotic office, to his parents' home, and then to the airport. Running late, Farbman considers canceling the trip, but doesn't. After the funeral, his lust for a fellow mourner leads him to an encounter with a mystic rabbi. The Hand Before the Eye is the often comic story of a contemporary man. With energetic and ironic prose, Donald Friedman take us into Farbman's world of law and medicine. Through Job-like suffering, Farbman gains enlightenment, learns the spiritual lessons of justice and healing. Finally , he understands that the good life offers us two true gifts: meaningful work and the love of another.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Lawyer David Farbman is a scrambling, perpetually desperate debtor, uninspiring father and dreadful husband. In this intentionally understated and earnest first novel, Farbman is the prism through which readers glean the pervasive anomie and avarice characterizing both domestic and business life, including, unsurprisingly, law offices in midtown Manhattan. Partnered with his friend Marco Marucci, Farbman works at a law practice that serves a pathetic, motley and relatively low-income lineup of clients who insure the protagonist is forever scurrying away from bankers and collection agents. Farbman hardly knows his two kids, Jennifer and Jason, and he hasn't been intimate with his wife, Ann Marie, for too long, but doesn't know how to get the fire back. Furthermore, Farbman's father, an enterprising dentist, self-made real-estater, and jerk, has no respect for his nearly middle-aged son. At a funeral in Illinois, Farbman meets and sleeps with Leah Stein, a hopeful actress who is as connected to the abundant rituals of Judaism as Farbman is remote and aloof from them. Their relationship is profound if sporadic, but the crucial plot twist occurs when Farbman, the hitherto obligatory Jew, discovers the sacred Jewish notion of baal teshuvah (master of the turning) and resolves to transform his hollow life. This intention proves untenable, and before long Farbman finds himself tending to a cancer-stricken wife, a failing business and multiple, blossoming betrayals. Suddenly, the "ordinary unhappiness" he was suffering seems like manageable misery against the inferno he now endures. Friedman sympathetically portrays this much-taxed every-guy while running him through a gauntlet of blunders and cruelties. Farbman's humiliation and loss have a redemptive effect on him, so what is primarily a careful chronicle of workaday shortsightedness concludes moralistically. As the book moves squarely toward the beatific blessedness its once-flawed protagonist has earned, there's a heartening, old-fashioned epiphany and an impassioned finale of spiritual redemption. (Dec.) FYI: This novel won the Mid-List Press First Series Award.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Middle-aged lawyer Farbman, who hustles personal injury cases and defends shady characters in New York City, is estranged from his shiksa wife, Ann Marie, and spends little time with his two children. When Ann Marie becomes critically ill, Farbman reevaluates his life and what is truly important. He studies the medical literature to secure the best treatment for her and takes an active role in the lives of his children. As Farbman becomes increasingly ethical in his behavior, his circumstances worsen until he loses virtually everything. He leaves the madness of urban existence to pursue a deeper spirituality, finally finding passion and meaning in his life. A heartening story of an individual making a dramatic and successful transformation. [This first novel won the publisher's First Series Award for the Novel.AEd.]AKimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, D.
-AKimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, DC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-AKimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, DC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Friedman's First Novel is a Winner,
By Spiro Athanas (Bloomington, IN) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Hand Before the Eye (Hardcover)
Donald Friedman's first book, The Hand Before The Eye, is a winner. Not only did it garner the First Series Award for the Novel proffered by the Mid-List Press, it has also won my admiration and respect for the author as a truly gifted writer. Friedman handles the trials, tribulations and eventual redemption of his main character, lawyer Farbman, with ironic insight and often comic verve. His is the wit, style and intelligence of the polished contemporary novelist. The central message of his book might best be described as "God is where you make Him". It is a powerful truth.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Remarkable First Novel,
This review is from: The Hand Before the Eye (Hardcover)
Many novels are entertaining, exciting, engaging; a few are literature. The difference is illusive and relative, but has to do with a brilliance in the way words, story, characters, images, thoughts and settings illuminate each other. It has to do, most of all, with the way they produce a depth of experience that approaches wisdom -- offering the reader more profound insights into the way of the world.Donald Friedman's "The Hand Before the Eye" is, remarkably for a first novel, literature. It is also very funny. Farbman, the lawyer, dealing more with the quirks of clients and the hounding of creditors than with anything he learned in law school, is all of us who find ourselves compromised, somehow unfulfilled, yearning for a greater sense of purpose. The ingredients for happiness are there, a potentially lucrative career, an attractive family and friends, but, with Farbman's undermining of them and their own very faulty construction, they do not satisfy. His quest starts with escape and sex, following a funeral. But Farbman's escape into the embrace of an elusively honest and beautiful woman leads him into new levels of questions, as does his encounter at a religious retreat (which he attends for less than the purest motivations) with the unexpectedly unnerving presence of a mystic rabbi. Temporary escape, however, is not the answer for Farbman, now that he has glimpsed something more profound. One of the most striking insights of Judaism is that meaning occurs in the reality and details of life, not in theories. What do you say when you get up in the morning? What do you eat? How do you put on your clothes? How and to what are you connected? Any wisdom Farbman gains cannot have meaning except as it affects and changes the life of Farbman. And it is that process that Donald Friedman describes, with brilliance and humor, so that, like other novels that are literature, it affects how we see our lives.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Returning.,
By Michael Gross (River Edge, New Jersey) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Hand Before the Eye (Hardcover)
Farbman is a smart lawyer with successful parents, a brotherly partner, a beautiful wife, two perfect children and a good friend. His saga begins at a meeting with a Rabbi that gives him to insight into the emptiness of his success, and a hint a what is needed to turn things around. Contrary to appearances, his marriage is failing, his law practice is venal, he has no relationship with his parents or his children and his friendships will collapse. He realizes his life lacks meaning but he can't make the turn until his wife get's so sick that he is really needed. It looks as if purpose will serve a cure, but Donald Friedman is too smart for a simple story. Just when we expect him to be rewarded for his responsive behavior to his wife and children, Farbman's life crumbles from bonuses to boils. Donald Friedman has written a very important book in the guise of a funny and high paced melodrama. The book is about "Teshuva". It takes a book this good to explain that Teshuva is the "turn", or more accurately the "return", anyone seeking a spiritual connection in their life must make. Ultimately, it isn't fun; it's deadly serious. The wonderful thing about this book is that Friedman makes us laugh while he teaches us the theological formula for a sucessful life.
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