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Contemporary Fiction Views: Being honest in one's faith [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-14
A man returns to his college town to mourn the suicide of a friend, reconnects with his former love (who is now a county prosecutor) and is drawn into investigating a mystical Jewish sect that makes him wonder about his staid version of faith. And he also is named the scribe of the sect, or cult, leader. Who happens to be in prison for killing his only son, Osman.
Daniel Torday's The 12th Commandment is several kinds of story. There is the return to Zeke's college roots, which often is the catalyst in fiction for a character beginning to examine what really matters to him. There is the question of whether Natan of Flatbush, the religious leader, killed his child. There is the uneasy relationship between the sect, with some of its members living a hardscrabble life out in the country, and the townies. And there are the philosophical, religious and mystical aspects to the story, and how they connect to the rest of the narrative.
The novel's sect are the Dönme, a group of Jews in the Ottoman Empire who converted to Islam on the surface, but continued their Jewish worship in private. They developed a set of 18 Commandments, which figure in the novel. The 12th one refers to keeping the true information about their sect a secret and approving of killing to keep it so, if necessary. Is that what Natan, the self-styled prophet of the little group in the small Ohio community, did to supposedly protect it?
And why do they smoke so much weed? Every time Zeke visits the group, he gets stoned whether he intends it or not.
Things begin to heat up as word immediately gets out that Zeke, who works for a New York-based magazine, is looking into the death. Maybe the football-playing bullies, who went to school with Osman, had something to do with it. One of those bullies is the son of the local sheriff, who was a senior at college when Zeke and his friends were freshmen. Every time Zeke's rental is ransacked, the sheriff warns him to clear out. When he takes Zeke for a ride after one incident, it does not turn into the expected crooked/bigoted cop routine.
Several of the people who live on the compound that Natan founded when he and his wife left New York as a young married couple and homesteaded demonstrate the complexity of a group of dedicated worshippers who try to work together. Creating the portrait of a sect that is not single-minded, yet determined to make things work, is another aspect of the novel that brings it all together.
Often, events take unexpected turns in the story as past events are revealed. Torday's ability to set something up, only to not take the cliched route, keeps the story moving along.
That is helpful if a reader gets entrapped in the metaphysical part of the story. Natan, who agrees to see Zeke while he is in prison, believes what he is saying about finding redemption through sin and how commandments are predictive of the future.
It can get deep. Sometimes, it seems like reading the ramblings of someone who has been living the high life for years, and who has not come down. What keeps the novel going are the complete sincerity of the characters engaged in these discussions, especially Natan and Zeke, and the way in which that 12th commandment plays a role in what did happen, and what will happen.
The concept on which The 12th Commandment is based is the heart of the sect, in which secrecy is necessary for its members to live honestly by the tenets of their actual faith. It is that juxtaposition that keeps the novel's threads in balance. It also is a fascinating idea to take out into the real world.
What does living honestly according to what a person believes entail? Is there a way to be honest with oneself and the world, especially if not causing harm is a goal? The lack of that honesty and the blatant hypocrisy so often celebrated today makes it something worth contemplating.
That contemplation is something that Zeke does when he undertakes a sect ritual as if he was a member, and has an experience. He has another one when Natan announces he will cause a miracle. The telling of what happens is constructed in such a way that a reader can interpret what happened, or what Zeke thinks happened, without being actually told. But it’s done in such a fair-play way that reflects the novel’s ideas of faith and honesty.
Book notes:
The book-loving staff at Lithub has compiled a list of fiction, poetry and several kinds of nonfiction to bring Palestine to readers. It’s adding to my TBR mountains.
Among the scheduled new fiction titles are:
Day by Michael Cunningham. From the publisher:
April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, husband and wife, are slowly drifting apart—and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, is living vicariously through a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. And then there is Nathan, age ten, taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while his sister, Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.
The Book of Ayn by Lexi Freiman. From the publisher:
After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand’s theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse.
Treacle Walker by Alan Garner. From the publisher:
An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock is trying to make sense of the world. Living alone in an old house, he spends his time reading comic books, collecting birds’ eggs, and playing with marbles. When one day a rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker appears on a horse and cart, offering a cure-all medicine, a mysterious friendship develops and the young boy is introduced to a world beyond his wildest imagination. Short-listed for the Booker.
Taming the Divine Heron by Sergio Pitol. From the publisher:
The semi-autobiographical story of a novelist working on his newest masterpiece. The protagonist struggles to tell the perfect story--his own imagined protagonists mere imitations of the likes of Lord Jim and Alyosha Karamavoz. To help eradicate writer's block, Pitol uses his vessel to praise his own favorite authors.
An Ordinary Youth by Walter Kempowski. From the publisher:
A novel drawn directly from the author's boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter's family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter's main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother’s jazz records, his father’s fluctuating moods, and his mother’s ministrations and anxieties.
The Homewood Trilogy by John Edgar Wideman. From the publisher:
A reissue of the revered trilogy that launched his career—two novels and story collection all set in Wideman’s own hometown.
The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump. From the publisher:
An abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts doesn't look like much. But to Rio, a young Black woman bereft after the loss of her newborn child, this hill becomes more than a safe haven—it becomes a place to start over. She convinces her husband to help her construct a society underground, somewhere safe, somewhere everyone can feel loved, wanted, and accepted, where the children learn actual history, where everyone has an equal shot.
Stockholm by Noa Yedlin. From the publisher:
Avishay is up for the Nobel Prize for Economics. There’s just one problem—he’s dead. His four closest friends agree that the well-earned prize must stay within his grasp, and so conspire to conceal Avishay’s corpse until the committee’s announcement.
So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan
The latest from the author of the beloved Foster.
Red Harvest: A Graphic Novel of the Terror Famine in Soviet Ukraine by Michael Cherkas. From the publisher:
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin waged a brutal war against the Soviet peasantry leading to the Holodomor, the terror-famine that killed at least 4 million Ukrainians during the fall and winter of 1932-33. Red Harvest is based on the tragic events that took place in Soviet Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1933.
Kinderland by Liliana Corobca. From the publisher:
With her parents gone in search of work, twelve-year-old Cristina must act as a mother to her two younger brothers. Through her eyes, we experience the feeling of wonderment and loneliness as they roam the streets of a contemporary Moldovan village. Her mother has gone to Italy, her father to Siberia, and the children grow up fast, imitating the gestures of the absent adults, and chasing their fading memories of normal family life.
Daughters of Muscadine: Stories by Monic Ductan. From the publisher:
Two events tie together the nine stories in Monic Ductan's debut: the 1920s lynching of Ida Pearl Crawley and the 1980s drowning of a high school basketball player, Lucy Boudreaux. Both forever shape the people and the place of Muscadine, Georgia, in the foothills of Appalachia.
The daughters of Muscadine are Black southern women who are, at times, outcasts due to their race and are also estranged from those they love. A remorseful woman tries to connect with the child she gave up for adoption; another, immersed in loneliness, attempts to connect with a violent felon. Two sisters love each other deeply even when they cannot understand one another. A little girl witnessing her father's slow death realizes her own power and lack thereof. A single woman weathers the excitement—and rigors—of online dating.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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