Zwilling's Dream [Hardcover]

Ross Feld (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1999

This richly ironic comedy is a nimble juggle of shifting realities, where the briefest collisions of experience shape the lives of a middle-aged writer and his son. . At the age of twenty-two, Joel Zwilling is emerging as a literary wunderkind. He has published a successful first novel, and his story about a widowed writer is about to be featured in a leading magazine. Yet just before the piece appears, Joels real wife and daughter are killed in a car accident. He is left with a young son to raise and a resulting writers block as large and unmoving as a pyramid. Over the next two decades, Joels career will be all but eclipsed by that of his son, Nate, whose own youthful writing success has given him the confidence to hope for big things. Thus Nate is astounded--and jealous--when his father is approached by a slick director who wants to capture his tragic early work on film. As the filmmaker and his sensual assistant bedevil father and son, the retributions rain down upon both sides. In a finely-tuned symphony of the wry as well as the heartbreaking, Ross Feld explores the surprising ways in which our lives can be sculpted, not by the people we hold most dear, but by an invariable troupe of unlikely others.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A wry narrative voice subtly tempers the melancholy nature of Feld's (Only Shorter; Years Out) tender and intelligent novel. In a dark comedy that achieves a literary dimension, an unexpected film project brings together Joel Zwilling, a middle-aged, erstwhile literary wunderkind; Brian Horkow, a mercurial, hack movie producer; and Selva Tashjian, Brian's long-suffering production assistant. Joel, who has lived in Cincinnati since the tragic accidental deaths of his first wife and their daughter in the mid-'70s, is the author of Less Him, a precocious first novel about growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors. His only other successful project was a short story in which a newly widowed man is crippled by grief (the story appears as a prologue to this novel). Tragically, its publication coincided with the deaths of Joel's family, and Joel's guilt at imagining the tale has engendered a severe writer's block. Remarried, he teaches at a small college; his son, Nate, has left home for his own writing career in New York. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Brian receives a grant from a Holocaust Studies Foundation to make a film, and chooses Less Him. After convincing Joel and Nate to work with them, Brian and Selva invade Cincinnati in classic "on-location" pre-production style, where the private lives of all involved are knotted up into a thoroughly analyzed tangle. Judaism and religious faith are much discussed, but the real spiritual power in the novel is secular, and radiates from Selva, whose professional exterior and vast reserves of compassion mask her own traumas. Coping with the frenzied demands of her boss (who is haunted by his daughter's cystic fibrosis and a son's death, not to mention late-breaking news that the Holocaust Foundation is a fraud), a subtly evolving relationship with Joel and a fraught friendship with Joel's wife, Barbara, Selva struggles to keep herself and everyone around her afloat. An intricate and compelling character, Selva reads Montaigne, is resigned to a life of temporary relationships with married lovers, and takes what she can get and doesn't complain too loudly. In exploring these disparate, desperate lives, Feld sounds for emotional depth without losing sight of life's absurdities. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Joel Zwilling doesn't want to be a writer anymore. After his wife and daughter die in a car crash, he gives up a promising career as a novelist and moves to Cincinnati to quietly raise his son. Years later, when a desperate actor digs up Zwilling's first book and gets the money to make a movie of it, Zwilling's carefully rebuilt life begins to collapse. Forced to relive long-buried memories, he is suddenly made aware of the half-truths at the foundations of his marriage and his relationship with his son, Nate. Feld movingly portrays a man who feels that, in order to survive, he must deny his essence. When circumstances prod Zwilling into recognizing his true nature, he finally comes to terms with his loss and begins writing again. This is an intricate novel that strings together the perspectives of various people in Zwilling's life, including his wife, his son, and the actor who foists unwanted introspection on him, to illuminate the man's emotions with their understanding. Bonnie Johnston

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (September 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430217
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430218
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,512,061 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WONDERFUL! A STORY WITHIN A NOVEL WITHIN A SCREENPLAY, September 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Zwilling's Dream (Hardcover)

All of the audacity and wit that we've come to expect from Ross Feld are here on abundant display. Read the heartbreaking "story" that starts this off and see if you're not hooked! I love Zwilling, the wunderkind who can't write after having been punished, or so it seems, because he's foretold the loss of his wife and child. I love Harkow, too, the sweetly ineffectual has-been movie producer Suddenly all the BUSINESS of "The Industry," (does sometimes seem it's the only Industry anyone cares anything about) is so humanized by these oh-do-fallable humans, Jews, mostly, who have somehow created something SO DEEP in the creation of a Hollywood that has, in turn, created Modern American Life with its worship of fame. Pour yourself a glass of wine and put your feet up on the hassock by the fire and read this book as the days grow short. The sentences are so beautiful, the grasp and range of Feld's intelligence so wide and kind.

5.0 out of 5 stars "A father passed down to his son no legacy worse than a lack of initiative.", April 26, 2007

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Zwilling's Dream (Paperback)

After I finished Zwilling's Dream, I went looking on the Internet for information about Ross Feld. I found another review of the book on the Curled Up With a Good Book site which began by saying saying that the book was a novel with a secret smile. At first, I kind of resented the line. If there is a smile in Zwilling's Dream, it seems to me the smile that happens when tragedy goes so far that it passes into comedy. But then I realized that my objection didn't make the idea less true. So. Secret smile.

This is the first work by Ross Feld that I have read, and I am sorry that I am only discovering him now, six years after his death in 2001. I am a little bit inadequate to the task of saying how impressed I was by the book, but impressed is really the right word. There's the notion of tragedy, and children, and expression and families. One of the characters remarks something to the effect that everyone has his own issue with God, and Feld makes that issue plain beneath the surface of ordinary lives. Selva and her issues with endometriosis and the end of her fertility; Joel with his dead twin; Barbara and her childlessness; Brian and his beloved daughter with cf. In the world of Zwilling's Dream, God has an awful lot to answer for in life. It is a measure of the strength Feld paints in his characters that so many of them, finally, seem to get the joke.

The quality of the prose is very high-- smooth, bittersweet and (like the main character) almost a little bit too smart for its own good.

I would recommend this book for anyone with an eye for smart literature. I was moved and a little bit wounded by what I found.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is what fiction's supposed to do, September 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Zwilling's Dream (Hardcover)

Exquisitely-written and captivating. Ross Feld understands as much about love and death--the real stuff--as almost anyone.