Francine Prose writes in the New York Times:
His central character, Nathan Mirsky, receives a letter from his brother, eats dinner, gets drunk, smokes pot and then rapes his sympathetic, appealing girlfriend. I mention this to warn readers who might feel that this series of events would prevent them from ever sympathizing with such a character — and from not just enjoying but marveling at a novel in which such a thing could happen, and so soon. But readers who stay with this rewarding book will also have been put on notice by this scene, made aware that Havazelet is a writer who takes huge risks, who challenges us — and himself — to love those who are the most unlovable, the most deeply and humanly flawed.
Though the narrative skips nimbly across a range of divergent points of view, the dominant one is that of Nathan Mirsky. Completing his medical education in the emergency room of a Boston hospital, Nathan spends his precious spare time seeing a therapist for a battery of problems, including a marijuana-and-alcohol habit and an even more destructive sexual addiction. The plot is set in motion when Nathan receives a letter from his unstable, charismatic, drug-dependent older brother, Daniel, a former ’60s radical. The characteristically gnomic, lyrical and hyper-charged letter is, it turns out, posthumous. At some point between its sending and receipt, Daniel has been murdered in San Francisco, possibly in the course of a narcotics transaction.
Here’s my interview with Ehud Havazelet.
Starred Review. The past wrecks the male members of the Mirsky family differently in story writer Havazelet’s haunting debut novel, his first book since 1998’s Like Never Before. Growing up in early 1970s Queens, Nathan Mirsky idolizes his older brother, Daniel, a student antiwar activist at Columbia University, but after Daniel moves to the West Coast and begins a downward spiral into addiction, the brothers grow apart. Twenty years later, Nathan, a medical resident in Boston, receives a letter from Daniel mailed the same day Daniel was murdered. Their father, Sol, a widower and Holocaust survivor compiling an archive of Holocaust stories, accompanies Nathan to San Francisco to learn more about Daniel’s death. There they meet Daniel’s lover, Abby, and her six-year-old son, Ben (who isn’t Daniel’s). The story reveals less about Daniel’s death than about the accumulated grievances and regrets that comprise his, as well as his father’s, legacies. Havazelet treats painful subjects—the death of an infant, concentration camp scenes—with wrenching understatement, and his depictions of Nathan’s therapy sessions provide insight and levity. The novel ends on a surprisingly optimistic note, but what lingers are its portraits of people bearing the weight of their family history.
