Customer Reviews

Zwilling's Dream

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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.

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.

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