Although Jewdar doesn’t normally engage in reviewing books without pictures, we figured that given the way things are going in Stockholm, just reviewing a book may be enough to get us a Nobel Prize for Literature. That said, for transparency’s sake, before offering an apercu of approbation forHummingbirds (Harper Collins), freshman author Josh Gaylord’s exploration of erotic energy and emotional entanglements at an elite East Side educational establishment, Jewdar, like a character in a Russ Myers film, has a few things to get off our chest.
1. Josh is a FOJ. Normally, when a reviewer says that an author is a friend or has some other personal relationship, it’s to let the reader know that there is a potential bias in the book’s favor. In this case, however, it’s the opposite–while in the abstract, Jewdar of course wants Josh’s book to be a smurfpendous success, in practice, as an egomaniac with literary pretensions, we want the book to fail sufficiently that we don’t feel like a failure ourselves. Hence, anything positive we say is not only sincere, but represents a tremendous struggle over our petty, petty inclinations.
2. Our reading tends towards the following five categories:
- Comic books
- Military history
- Jews
- Fiction in which absurd and/or violent things happen
- Cthulhu
Hence, it should be kept in mind that anything negative we say probably says less about the book, which is really beautifully written (see #1, above), than about Jewdar’s own limitations as reader.
And away we go. The book tells the tale of one Leo Binhammer, sole male teacher of English at the fictional Carmine-Casey school for girls on the Upper East Side. Binhammer’s role of rooster-in chief of the henhouse gets threatened by the arrival of Ted Hughes, a prize bantam cock with a poetic moniker. What ensues is an emotional menage à trente as the two pedagogues parley over the affections of Hughes’ wife, their distaff devotees in the department and the dozens of demoiselles in their charge, including a few who are sexually charged themselves.
Prurient pandering notwithstanding, this is not Lolita 2009, and you’ll find less salacity in it’s 300+ pages than in a 30-second commercial for Gossip Girl. In what will doubtlessly be a relief to the parents of the kids Gaylord teaches, the novel is not about sex between teachers and students, but about sexual tension between men and women–and if sometimes those women are young, and under the tutelage of the men in question, well, that’s part of what makes it so tense. After all is said and done, however, the soundtrack for the film adaptation we could easily imagine being made might include something by the Police, but Don’t Stand So Close To Me may be less apropos than Synchronicity.
As for the merits of the book, we admit to a mixed-bag, based largely on what we said earlier about our own literary tastes. That is, our tastes run more to shooting, pie throwing, and monsters than complex interpersonal relationships, and as we told Gaylord, our biggest disappointment was that he unwittingly set up a great joke about a character’s sexual shortcomings and failed to deliver the punch line (What can we say? Give Jewdar a choice between erotic frisson and penis jokes, and we’ll take the latter, every time).
We also had the same problem with Josh Gaylord’s Upper East Side as we do with Josh Schwartz’s–it apparently exists in an alternate reality where the Nazis conquered Yorkville. We had some high hopes with English teacher Lonnie Abramsom and her daughter, Andie, but then Gaylord sucker-punched Jewdar with a reference to their Christmas celebration. We’re willing to forgive the absence of a character based on Jewdar, but come on, even at an oyishgay Upper East Side school, 20 percent of the names end with some variation of "berg," "stein, " or "owitz," (and another 30 percent used to).
Lack of circumcision jokes notwithstanding, what we said before about it being beautifully written is as true now as it was four paragraphs ago. And while it’s the kind of thing one might say when trying to be kind, like saying the cinematography of a film was fantastic when the film itself was an unspeakable abomination that sends you into a Hulk-like rage when you think about it, in this case we mean it in the best way possible. Gaylord’s descriptive gifts evoke Hannnukah (meaning 8 times better than Christmas) and even if we would have liked him to say some other things, we wouldn’t have wanted him to say them any other way. The fact that even with our issues, we at no point felt that the story dragged says much about Gaylord’s talents. Indeed, the one time I felt the dialogue sounded contrived was followed by a character’s complaint that the speaker was a phony who rehearsed his repartee beforehand (okay, that’s true, but we really just included that to show how smart we are).
So what does all this mean? Jewdar would say that if you’re the kind of smart reader who likes complex, smurftastically written, grown-up books where people have complicated relationships and are confronted by morally ambiguous choices, this book is a must read. And if you’re not, Gaylord’s writing certainly merits giving him a second chance–and don’t worry, his next book is about zombies.
i love gossip girl.