The world is ambiguous, yes, and that’s pounded into our heads. One sees no growth, little reconciliation, and no useful understanding for the state of the first two in my list. There was a desk beneath the window and chairs along the walls.īanal description will hardly kill a novel, but if they are sufficiently banal and frequent, why include them? Why describe places that are everyplace and weather that’s as bad as the weather anywhere? There is no reason, and part of the reason I called My Name is Asher Lev strange in the first paragraph is because these descriptive problems are not so enormous that they capsize the novel.Īlas, The Gift of Asher Lev is a disappointment compared to My Name is Asher Lev. It was a large waiting room with white walls, a single window in the wall to my right, and a heavy wooden door in the wall across from the window. The apartment was neat and clean and faintly resonant with its own silence. A bitter wind blew against the tall buildings.
I got off the train and climbed the stairs to the street. Parts of the novel fail, like a painting askew: a mythic ancestor arrives in Asher’s dreams for no particular point, and many descriptions are flat, especially given all the discussions of how an artist sees. We think he makes the correct trade-offs, but in such a milieu, those trade-offs are grave indeed.
In growing up, Asher makes the difficult choices growing up entails.
Both novels act as defenses against that charge, and they are mostly successful. In some criticism of Asher’s art within the novel, one senses the same kind of criticism that might be used against Potok: sentimentality and a rejection of trends in art hobble him. Asher doesn’t give up, and if at times the pompousness of the art talk almost overwhelms, other moments of genuine emotion make up for near bombast. The struggle to develop his eye and practice his visual art while remaining faithful to the extreme interpretations and teachings of religion fuels the novel’s conflict. I looked at my father and saw lines and planes I had never seen before. As a young man, heīegan to realize that something was happening to my eyes. Inside, however, the artist predominates, and, as is typical in American fiction, self identity trumps group identity, as it should. But it’s done well here, and one feels Asher’s agony as he attempts to tread the artist’s path and the Hasidim’s. The duality inherent in mixed loyalties is hardly a new topic the most obvious example I know of is Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. Think of his sect like the Verbovers of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. My Name is Asher Lev concerns a boy divided between the drive for art that possesses him and the Hasidic religion into which he is born, which is somewhat like the Jewish equivalent of fundamentalist Christians. Read Chaim Potok’s strange yet compelling My Name Is Asher Lev and skip its deracinated sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev.
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