Customer Reviews

Tales Out of School

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In the language of Hollywood:Isaac Singer meets Tennessee Williams, but this beautiful, sultry, intelligent novel is anything but glib. The heart-breaking story of this family of prosperous German Jews in Texas in the 1900s is told through the eyes of Felix, who is fourteen, bookish, lonely, and left more or less to fend for himself as his family, having rotted from the inside out, disintigrates. During the course of the summer, Felix discovers his sexual identity as well as his capacity for compassion. These characters come fully alive on the page. His mother is especially memorable, and the story has enough twists and turns to be full of surprise. This is a book in which I got completely immersed, and one I won't forget. Highly recommended.

Ben Taylor uses lyrical, mellifluous prose to describe the arc of a genteel and eccentric Jewish family in Galvaston Island at the turn of the century. This lovely novel is populated by a memorable cast of characters: precocious fourteen year-old Felix who is adrift and alternately besotted with Virgil's Aeneid and a thuggish classmate named Wick; his beautiful mother Lucy, who, rudderless and lonely after her husband dies in a hurricane and torn between her adopted religion and her Roman Catholic roots, turns to laudanum and madness; Leo, Lucy's bachelor brother-in-law, amateur ornithologist, and the spendthrift backer of a flying machine built by two local bicycle repairmen of questionable talent; Velma Truly and her companion, Etta Murph who provide an often comical moral center; Nathan Gernsbacher, an elderly rabbi who is having more than a little trouble keeping the faith; and, finally, Schmulowicz, the mysterious mute stranger from Russia who alters the lives of everyone. By turns erotic, humorous, and deeply sad, this novel resonates long after the reader has closed the book.

"Tales out of School" is beautiful and engaging. The characters are well wrought,but never two dimensional. This book is a thrill to read!

What odd and bewitching creatures the first airplanes must have been! Half bug, half angel; tinkered out of the most common materials -- wood, cloth and wire; both too frail and too heavy, it would seem, to leave the ground. Yet they flew.

Benjamin Taylor's debut novel is like that. The story of a wealthy Jewish family's decline in turn-of-the-century Galveston, Texas, it's also a mythic tale in which a spinster Latin tutor is a sibyl, a 14-year-old boy's curiosity about the father he lost in a hurricane is paralleled with Aneneas's journey to the underword, and the prophet Elijah arrives in the "Ellis Island of the West" in the guise of a mute elderly immigrant who gives puppet shows and spells out his every utterance on an "alphabet board."

Taylor ("Into the Open: Reflections on Genius and Modernity") uses dark elements -- syphilis, drowning, laudanum addiction, madness, bankruptcy, suicide -- as ribs on which to stretch a fabric of reverie, youthful hope, homoeroticism, and comedy. It's an unlikely contraption, too clever by half. We can hear it creak as it rols down the runway.

Yet it flies.

The lifting force, and the glue that holds things together, is Taylor's style. He can soar in a paragraph from vernacular to poetry; he can sum up a character in a few sentences of dialogue, whether it's the venerable Rabbi Gernsbacher flirting with heresy or two young aeronauts, Peter Munger and Albert Roache, cobbling together a flying machine with what remains of the Mehmel fortune.

"Gerson and Liselotte Mehmel had brought their Europe with them to America," the novel's magisterial narrative voice tells us -- a raw country that for these highly cultured people was a last recourse, "good for making money, that was all."

They made the money brewing "the finest beer in Texas." Their son Aharon, married to a New Orleans beauty, Lucy Pumphrey, built a mansion despite the misgivings of the family banker, who had seen "the angel of luck" dance through the wainscoting of his office when he financed the brewery but saw "a different angel, a dark one" hover behind the younger Mehmel. In Taylor's Galveston, even bankers are mystics.

When "Tales out of School" opens, it is 1907. Aharon is dead, victim of high water and venereal disease. His widow, torn between her native Catholic and adopted Jewish faiths, is hooked on patent medicines and losing her mind. His bachelor brother, Leo, studies birds and squanders his inheritance on the airplane project. Gernsbacher is "tired of being a rabbi." The brewery is sinking fast.

The only person on his way up seems to be Aharon's son Felix, who is studying the classics with tutor Etta Murph and her lover Velma Truley. He picks up knowledge of a profaner sort from Wick Frawley, a kid from across the tracks who unearths Aharon's old medical records while cleaning a doctor's office and initiates Felix into sex.

Still, it takes the mysterious Yankel Schmulowicz and his magical puppets to give the novel's propeller a twirl.

The creature coughs and trembles. Such a heaviness of learning to bear on its wings! Such a flimsy construct of fantasy to hold together with nothing more than a few tens of thousands of well-chosen words! One might as well impose European order on Texas, as the Mehmels, Gernsbacher and others try to do in vain.

Yet it flies.

-- Mark Harris, The Los Angeles Times

Tales Out of School is a wonderful, able, mature first novel, easily one of the finest debuts in recent American fiction. As other reviewers have noted here, the prose is marvelous--delicate and sinuous--though the book is far from a stylistic exercise. Taylor's investment in language and his story are never at odds, one always seems dependent on the other. With intriguing asides on history and mythology, and a wide cast of characters, men and women of diverse age and temperament, Tales Out of School can be read in a day or two, for the book's pacing is as much of an achievement as its style. Both concise and languorous, it holds more power and intelligence than most novels three times its size.

Tales Out of School stays with you forever. The lyrical prose and perfect evocation of an era is magical and exquisite. To be honest the apparent ease in which this book is written is quite intimidating. Taylor is an author to be envied. Each time I return to this marvelously crafted novel I am impressed and whisked away.

Benjamin Taylor's Tales Out of School combines a beautiful coming of age/coming out tale, reminiscent of Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story, with an intellectual bildungsroman, with an attentive historical novel about Jews in turn of the century Texas, with an almost Pynchonesque sub-plot about the early days of manned flight. It is a strange and wonderful concoction, and a novel I have returned to many times, enjoying it more with each reading.

I'm partway through this book, because the back sounded a bit like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It's an in depth look into a boys life. I recommend it.

In my fourtyfive years as an editor for my local paper I have not yet found a novel that starts with such promise as this one. The unfourtunate thing is that by the end of the book Taylor's prose becomes quickly messy and overly-explanitive. Dissapointing for such a promising author.

Ben Taylor's first novel seems ambitious at first but quickly falls into strange, muddled, and weak prose. An Ambitious undertaking, however Ben seems to have forgotten that less is more. Overall, like the man himself, I found the novel too weak and pretentious to get through.

I know you can do better Ben.