The Book of Getting Even by Benjamin Taylor

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Rich with both laughter and pain, Taylor's novel is a different sort of love story, elegantly written and deeply satisfying.

The history of mathematics holds many distinguished names, but three stand out: Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss. The son of a rabbi, a self-described cosmologist and budding astronomer, Gabriel Geismar intends to make that trio a quartet. As he travels the path from youth to manhood during the turbulent '70s, Gabriel's journey is one of drama, discovery, and bittersweet humor. From his home in New Orleans to college in Philadelphia, his passion has always resided in the sweet detachment and unchangeable rules of mathematics. Integers, fractions, and primes were his family and his connection, not his angry father or his loving but timid mother -- each, all too sadly, the other's misfortune.

But at college, Gabriel finds a new and more potent connection -- a true home, his rightful place -- within the eccentric Hundert clan. The twins, Danny and Marghie, become his friends; their parents, brilliant intellectuals, are the family he should have had. This is his proper inheritance; theirs is a marriage the way it's supposed to be; and here is the thoughtful and intelligent exchange of views he has longed for. However, as the years pass, Gabriel's deepening attachment and greater intimacy with his elective family reveal that it is he, the outsider, who must bear the tragedy and sadness at their very core. (Fall 2008 Selection)

From the Publisher

Son of a rabbi, budding astronomer Gabriel Geismar is on his way from youth to manhood in the 1970s when he falls in love with the esteemed and beguiling Hundert family, different in every way from his own. Over the course of a decade-long drama unfolding in New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and the Wisconsin countryside, Gabriel enters more and more passionately and intimately into the world of his elective clan, discovering at the inmost center that he alone must bear the full weight of their tragedies, past and present. Yet The Book of Getting Even is funny and robust, a novel rich in those fundamentals we go to great fiction for: the exploration of what is hidden, the sudden shocks, the feeling at last of life laid bare.

Publishers Weekly

In this delightful, character-driven coming-of-age novel, Gabriel Geismar grows up in mid-20th-century New Orleans as the only son of a rabbi, maturing into a brilliant, homosexual mathematician who is out of sync with his father's values. At Swarthmore in 1970, Gabriel meets the twins Daniel and Marghie Hundert, the children of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gregor Hundert, one of the so-called Hungarian Eight who emigrated to America and worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the bomb. Fascinated by the stately, Old World professor and his kindly wife, Lilo, and deeply attached to Marghie, a cinema-obsessed vegetarian, and to Daniel, an angry counterculture figure, Gabriel spends the summer with the family at their Wisconsin retreat, which yields cherished conversation and understanding. As Gabriel departs to study astrophysics at the University of Chicago, the tempo of Daniel's activism builds, and Marghie begins running a movie house. When the once great professor sinks into senile dementia, Lilo makes a necessary but terrible decision for them all. The editor of Saul Bellow's forthcoming letters, Taylor turns in a smart, humane look at what Gabriel calls the era's "intergenerational rancor." (May)

Patrick Sullivan - Library Journal

This elegiac novel features the long, tragic friendship of three young people coming of age in the 1970s. They meet as undergraduates at Swarthmore and begin their adult lives full of promise. By the end of the novel, that promise has given way to sadness, regret, and defeat, mainly because of bad choices. All three protagonists are skillfully rendered. Daniel and Marghie are fraternal twins, children of a Nobel prize-winning physicist, while Gabriel is the son of a rabbi from New Orleans. Although parts of the novel would have benefited from further development, much here is beautifully drawn: Gabriel's failed or unrealized romantic relationships prove especially poignant. These young people also lose their parents, and Taylor handles these passages with eloquence and pathos. This is a novel about friendship, loneliness, and the hazards adults encounter as they make their way in the world. Although not without its flaws, it nonetheless has much to offer. Recommended for libraries with large fiction collections.

Kirkus Reviews

Taylor's second novel (Tales Out of School, 1995) is an inconsequential story, with considerable pretensions, about a brainy gay Jewish astronomy student, his brainy best friends (twins) and their super-brainy parents. Gabriel Geismar is a mama's boy with an overbearing father, a rabbi in New Orleans. Gabriel loves numbers, especially as they relate to the cosmos; his other love is male bodies, which he satisfies by visiting a bathhouse. Deliverance from the rabbi comes in 1970, when he wins a scholarship to Swarthmore, outside Philadelphia, and meets Marghie and Danny Hundert, fraternal twins, who both fall in love with him; he reciprocates Danny's love, while Marghie becomes his big sister. The movie buff (Marghie) and the pacifist (Danny) are the children of Gregor Hundert, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, along with other Hungarian Jews, developed the atom bomb at Los Alamos. Gabriel is in seventh heaven when the courtly, old-world parents take a shine to him: These, surely, are his rightful parents, not the rabbi and the rebbetzin, whose deaths are described with arch humor. The story meanders through the '70s. Gabriel becomes a professor of astrophysics. Love affairs founder. Gabriel and Marghie ease their solitude with imaginary helpmates. Neither one is a fully formed, knowable character. We don't know Danny either, though he defines himself in spectacular fashion, first by his vow of silence to protest the Vietnam war, then by his attempt to assassinate Kissinger. This was Danny's project: "To get even. With the big perpetrators." It's hard to square it with the words from the Bhagavad Gita which are his father's mantra: "[T]he good deeds a man has done defend him." Gregorseems mocked by that mantra too, as he slips into dementia. The novel ends in irony and ambiguity as Gabriel, a more reliable "son" than the incarcerated Danny, scatters Gregor's ashes in Budapest. An intellectual peep show whose ultimate meaning remains elusive. Agent: Wendy Strothman/The Strothman Agency

Product Details