Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN reviewed in Seattle Times

"The Book of Getting Even": Young man's tale fascinates, until he graduates

By Mary Brennan
Special to The Seattle Times

"The Book of Getting Even" by Benjamin Taylor
Steerforth, 166 pp., $23.95

Benjamin Taylor's "The Book of Getting Even" is elegant and beautifully evoked, right down to the pediatrician — "the worst, the noisiest Nixon-lover in town" — who appears only in a couple of paragraphs. Set in the 1970s, "Book" follows brilliant, odd Gabriel Geismar, a kid with — literally — two left thumbs and a passion for mathematics, as he leaves his home in the South and heads for college in Philadelphia.

Gabriel is a rabbi's son who grows up in a New Orleans household ruled by his handsome, tyrannical father, who saves all his charm for strangers. At home, his tirades are awful but also funny and cartoonish. "He'd carry on in third person, like a sports hero or gangster: 'Tell a lie to Milton Geismar? You'll wish you hadn't!'"

On Gabriel's last night before leaving for college, he determinedly loses his virginity in a dim cubicle at a gay bathhouse, with eager Clarence Rappley, cold-heartedly described as a "king-sized cracker." After their brief encounter, Gabriel stills his racing mind with a foray into mathematics: "His mind veered to numbers, clean things, the cleanest indeed anywhere in or out of the world." It is a theme — the lifelong duel between mind and body — that resonates through the novel.

At Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, Gabriel meets the eccentric, irresistible brother-sister twins, Marghie and Daniel Hundert, who both fall in love with him. This strange, powerful triangle offers him everything he lacks: Danny and Marghie's parents are literate, worldly, opera-loving Hungarian émigrés — everything Gabriel's family isn't. Their father, to Gabriel's amazement, is a Nobel laureate. Gabriel quickly incorporates himself into the family.

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