Hunting Midnight

By Richard Zimler

Delacorte Press, 499 pages, $24.95.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

* * *|

In Richard Zimler’s latest novel, set in 19th-century Portugal, a young boy named John Zarcos Stewart begins suffering from terrifying hallucinations, images of the spirit of his dead friend, Daniel, who committed suicide. Daniel’s death was not the first tragedy John witnessed — another childhood friend had been raped and beaten, and Daniel’s grandmother was beaten in public for being a marrano, or secret Jew.

To allay his son’s toxic visions, John’s father, a wine seller, travels to Africa and returns with Midnight, a mystical Bushman healer with powers to exorcise the ghosts haunting John. Midnight succeeds, inexplicably, in freeing John of his demons, but when the African shaman disappears, John’s life slowly deteriorates, until he becomes determined to find his healer. He sets out on a quest, leading him through innumerable plot twists, set against the backdrop of Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal, and finally to antebellum America, where he assists in a slave rebellion.

The book spans 27 years and three continents, yet it reads more like a soap opera than an epic novel. Though Midnight’s poetic descriptions of the alternate world of spirits are colorful and evocative, the emotional exchanges between characters often come across as trite. But Zimler, who currently resides in Portugal, has a gift for recreating the superstitious, surreal Portugal of that era. Opium tinctures, leeches and a caged bird market are suggestive images that make readers feel as though they are walking through an open square bustling with the peculiar trappings of the 19th-century Iberian peninsula. And the book, which connects the experience of marranos and African-American slaves, ultimately becomes a mystery of larger proportions, posing questions about enslavement to demons real and imagined.

— RACHEL ZUCKERMAN

The Tattooed Girl

By Joyce Carol Oates

Ecco, 320 pages, $25.95.

Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, “The Tattooed Girl,” is dedicated to Philip Roth, and rightfully so. The protagonist, Joshua Siegl, is a brilliant, self-absorbed and decaying novelist whose occasional nemesis and companion, Alma Busch, seems directly plucked from “The Human Stain,” Roth’s brilliant take on the literary mystery. Yet while Oates’s work may resemble Roth’s at first glance, its overall quality pales in comparison.

The plot first begins to thicken, as they say, when the 38-year-old Joshua, who is suffering from a debilitating nerve disease, hires Alma, a near-illiterate vagabond, as his assistant. The young woman — who is decorated extensively in tattoos burned beneath her eye and on her hands by a mysterious group of abusive males — is, unbeknownst to Joshua, a raging antisemite who hates her boss. She even steals trinkets and other assorted items from Joshua, which she showers on her Jew-hating boyfriend.

At first, Oates uses Alma’s antisemitism as a vehicle to divine the source of antisemitism in the culture at large. The same predictable causes are rehashed — poverty, illiteracy and ignorance — all of which have plagued Alma’s life. Yet when Alma’s antisemitism inexplicably evaporates, so does Oates’s attempt at explaining it. The story becomes a meaningless melodrama.

In one scene, Joshua says that he believes the work that brought him success did so because it “forced the reader to imagine what the writer doesn’t reveal.” Oates’s ambition to achieve the same effect runs throughout this novel. But for her, what is meant to be elliptical is exposed as evasive.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$90 $180

$360

Other amount