Benjamin Taylor's The Book of Getting Even reviewed in Boston Globe

Short Takes
By Amanda Heller
Boston Globe, May 18, 2008

The Book of Getting Even
By Benjamin Taylor
Steerforth, 176 pp., $23.95

In August 1970, Gabriel Geismar leaves home for college, not a moment too soon for this disaffected son of a New Orleans rabbi. A puckish twin brother and sister, Marghie and Danny Hundert, worldly seniors, take him under their wing. When he meets their parents, Hungarian émigrés exuding Old World gravitas and New World intellectual cachet (Gregor Hundert is a renowned physicist, onetime colleague of the godlike Oppenheimer at Los Alamos), Gabriel is convinced that this is the family he was intended for. As charmed by the attentive Southern boy as he is by them, the elder Hunderts enfold Gabriel, who becomes more their natural heir as the years go by than the children nature gave them.

Marghie loves Gabriel, but to no avail, since Gabriel loves Danny, while Danny, slipping into psychological meltdown, is devoted to the tragicomic destiny he has created for himself as a martyr to the cause of protesting the war in Vietnam. War and peace, the fracturing of generations, the sexual revolution and its casualties - with irony and pathos this beautifully written novel treats the defining themes of an era, filtered through the restless, eccentric intelligence of a striking cast of characters.

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