Mark Oppenheimer

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And On The Seventh Day She Rested

By Mark Oppenheimer

‘The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” Judith Shulevitz’s look at the Judeo-Christian practice of setting aside every seventh day for rest, is both an extended exercise in public history and a spiritual autobiography. Discourses about the roots of the Sabbatarian tradition; the various theologies, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, that recommend it; the representations of it in literature; and the sociological ideas that help explain it are interlaced with personal reflections detailing Shulevitz’s own slow, reluctant history of celebrating the day of rest.Read More

Sunny Side Down

By Mark Oppenheimer

Perhaps you’ll know where I am going with this review if I begin by saying that Glen David Gold’s last book was splendid.Read More

There’s Something in the Air

By Mark Oppenheimer

Having just finished “Atmospheric Disturbances,” Rivka Galchen’s first novel, I find myself strangely unable to stop thinking about “Bandits,” the last Elmore Leonard novel I read. This is not because the two novels are similar, but because they are so radically dissimilar. Reading Galchen made me want to go reread Leonard, not as a complement but as an antidote. Galchen’s literary, cerebral book is about love, estrangement, emotional health and all sorts of important things, and it made me long for Leonard’s up-tempo, plot-driven pulp fiction about an ex-con trying to screw an ex-nun.Read More

Brownsville Boy

By Mark Oppenheimer

Of Alfred Kazin’s serried and august friends and enemies, people still know a lot: Irving Howe and Richard Hofstadter, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt — they all wrote grand books that will long outlive them, or they edited journals still extant, or they lived with such bombast that the dirt will hardly keep the coffin shut. But Kazin slips between the definitional cracks. He was never a communist, so he never became a turncoat; a mild socialist, he rejected Stalin early and had little to atone for. In the 1960s, as his friends were becoming unhinged by the rhetoric of the New Left, he maintained a bemused respect for the kids. He lacked Norman Mailer’s urge to brawl, yet also lacked Trilling’s social ease and charm. He was proud of Israel but had misgivings about Zionism. He loved being Jewish but had little time for Judaism. In the guild of book critics, he actually loved books. He always preferred an empty room, no disturbances and some large volumes waiting to be cracked. In fact, for decades he kept a small apartment downtown from his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; it was his office and his getaway.Read More

Scrapbook Inquiry

By Mark Oppenheimer

Given her belief in the instability of knowledge, Janet Malcolm is, on principle, always at a loss for clear answers. Instead, she has mastered the finely honed question. In “The Silent Woman,” what interested Malcolm — and the happily implicated reader — was whether Sylvia Plath had been treated fairly by her biographers. In “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Malcolm untangled an ethical dilemma: When has a reporter abused his subject’s trust? (Always, it turns out.) These books are little case studies in how to think about tough questions. Narrow the focus, read closely, consult some smart people, consider their prejudices, accept the limits of what’s knowable.Read More


 

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