January 2012, #4 and #5: Total Immersion and Kaaterskill Falls, by Allegra Goodman.
A lot of the books I’m reading right now are coming from the Brooklyn Public Library, which is driving my reading list towards a kind of eclecticism I might not get otherwise. Case in point: while browsing the new releases in the BPL digital collection, I saw that they’d just acquired a whole lot of stuff by Allegra Goodman. I really liked Intuition, so I put myself on the list for some of her others, not really knowing anything about them. It turns out that these two books (Total Immersion and Kaaterskill Falls) are very much like each other, and very much unlike Intuition. (I don’t mean that I didn’t like them, though. But maybe not as much as I liked Intuition.) Kaaterskill Falls is a novel, set in an Orthodox community in the late 1970s; Total Immersion is a collection of loosely linked short stories, primarily about Orthodox Jews living in either Oxford or Hawai’i. A few of the characters, mostly minor ones, from Kaaterskill Falls show up in Total Immersion,but at later points in their lives.
I didn’t really connect with Total Immersion. When I was about halfway through it, I mentioned to Matt that I sometimes have trouble with literary short fiction, because I’ll finish a story and feel unsatisfied, kind of like, what was the point? He suggested that I’m reading too fast and not paying enough attention to the writing, and he might be right. It’s a different mode of reading. You don’t read stories like this for plot, and when they’re about character, it’s more like a portrait than a movie, I think. (The first story in the collection, “Onionskin”, is entirely in the form of a letter, a woman writing to her former religion professor about what led her to take his class, why it wasn’t what she was looking for, and how she’s trying to find what she’s looking for. And I thought it was brilliantly done, a little window into a life, with a great voice. That’s kind of what I mean by a portrait.)
The Hawai’i stories in Total Immersion were the most compelling to me–they felt like the ones where Goodman was at her best, language-wise. Too many of the other stories, all of the Oxford stories, lean too much on academic politics. (Although I did like the academic in one of the first stories who was fighting the same rivals at shul and in his tiny corner of literary analysis.) And the last story in the collection, “The Closet”, the writing is just beautiful all the way through, and transcendent in places.
Kaaterskill Falls had different strengths–it’s about a particular Orthodox community, a separatist sect called the Kirshners that seems similar to the Satmar or Lubavitchers. There are a lot of characters moving through this novel, but the one that I loved most was Elizabeth, the young mother of five who’s struggling to find a balance between the joy she finds in her community and the restlessness she feels under its restrictions. She gives her daughters two names:
“To their friends they’re just the Shulman girls, five rattled off in a row: Chani, Malki, Ruchel, Sorah, and Brocha. But Elizabeth gave them other names, and she repeats them to herself: Annette and Margot, Rowena, Sabrina, and Bernice. These are her daughters’ real names; the ones on their birth certificates; extraordinary and graceful–princesses and dancers. It’s true, of course, the nickname Malki by itself means “queen,” and Sorah means “princess.” But those are words the children drag around the house. There must be twenty Sorahs at the Kirshner school. Elizabeth wanted something remarkable and elegant–beyond the usual expectations. She didn’t name her daughters to be rattled off. She named them to have imagination.”
At one point in the book, someone says to Elizabeth that she can do anything–this is America, after all, you can do whatever you damn well please. But this one isn’t escapist reading, you know? Elizabeth can’t do whatever she damn well pleases, and if she did, the cost would kill her. And as the book goes on, the restrictions hurt a little more, and she starts to see that her daughters will have the same life as her–they’ll have the same love and support and community and tradition, and they’ll have the same restricted horizons and confined lives. She sees that, and she lives through it, because that’s what you do.
There’s more to the book than Elizabeth, but she was the heart of it, for me. (Although I do secretly hope for another book someday, about her daughter Chani, who develops a private passion for Israel even though the Kirshners are strictly anti-Zionist. Here:
Chani has two real talents: memorizing Tanach and hiking. She has a prodigious memory for scripture, although the memorization does not come easily to her. She picks through the text doggedly, inching her way through hard passages. Like her father she learns slowly and meticulously. And once she has learned a passage, though it might take weeks, she knows it unshakably. She’s won the elementary girls’ Bible contest three times. At home in the city she has three pairs of candlesticks on the bookcase in her room, her trophies. Chani is even better at hiking. Fast and surefooted. Cecil says she’s an intuitive hiker and a first-rate rockhound. She’s found samples of nearly every kind of quartz: rose quartz, smoky quartz, white, brown, pale lavender. When she was nine, she made it to the top of Cole Mountain. Only she and Cecil and her father made it up that far.
Those are her favorite things–memorizing scripture and hiking on Cole Mountain. Each has its season: the Bible contest in January with the radiators hissing in the classroom, the hiking in the summer on leafy trails, ribbon trail markers tagging the trees. But it seems to Chani, when she thinks about Israel, that it is all scripture and hiking, with no separation between the two. She pedals her bike up to Kendall Falls and she pictures Israel, where all the trees are markers, and the geneaologies themselves are trails. Covenants are places; mountains stand as quotations from the prophets.
I loved Chani. Allegra Goodman seems to have thoroughly moved on from her writing-about-Jewish-communities phase, so I’m unlikely to ever get my Chani novel, but I’d love it.)
Posted Monday, January 16th, 2012 at 8:03 am. Filed under: personal.
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The Kirshners are modeled on the community that lives west of Broadway in Washington Heights, near the 190th St stop on the A/C line.
Btw, I was curious how widely known it was, and I ran across an academic book with a whole chapter about Allegra Goodman. See that chapter and particularly the footnotes: http://books.google.com/books?id=3ezzbBSCbU4C
Hi, it’s math teacher Liz who used to work with you. Surprise (is it?), I read your blog. Also at the mercy of library availability, I put myself on the list for The Cookbook Collector, the only Allegra Goodman book available on NYPL for Kindle.
I used to have a brooklyn library card a few years ago. I live in Manhattan now, but maybe I should check into seeing if I can get online on the brooklyn library too.
Right now, I’m reading the third book of Ursula Le Guin’s Annals of the Western Shore, but I guess I better hurry because there’s only one person in line ahead of me for The Cookbook Collector.
Liz! So good to hear from you–I miss you at school. And I totally know what you mean about hurrying to beat the book-hold queue–I had about seven books on hold all come up available within three days, and found myself kind of racing to finish them before they were due. (I didn’t quite make it–I abandoned one unread, and almost-but-not-quite finished the last.) I hope the Cookbook Collector is good. You should definitely check out Intuition at some point–it’s a good personal and academic politics kind of story.
Janet–I looked through some excerpts in that book on Google Books, and I hadn’t realized that Allegra Goodman was known for her writing about Orthodox communities. I came to her through Intuition, after I reviewed another book about the real-life incident that Intuition is loosely based on; between Intuition and her recent YA dystopia thinger, I think I had her in my head as a fiction-about-science writer. But that’s apparently just a really new phase in her career. Interesting.