Away: A Novel
by Amy Bloom
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Book Summary Information
Author: Amy BloomEdition: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2008-06-24
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Away: A Novel
Book Review: The Perils of Lillian
Summary: 4 Stars
Readers looking for an old fashioned, sedate, turn of the century tale are warned to look elsewhere. This story starts off with a bang and really never stops.
There are essentially two stories here- in the first our heroine Lillian flees her native Russia in the early 1920s after a pogram which ostensibly wipes out her entire Jewish family. She comes to New York and we get the whole immigrant-Jewish-lower east side experience which is well done. Sort of Henry Roth light. Unfortunately, by about 60 pages or so, this story is played out. How to revive the flagging story line? Easy - ROAD TRIP. Yes, that tried and true literary device of going on a quest where the journey becomes more important than the final goal yadda yadda yadda. Still, it seems to work. As I said, it's a tried and true device. Lillian learns that her daughter Sophie may not be dead after all and sets off to Siberia by way of Seattle and Alaska. (Im not giving anything away that wasn't on the book blurb.) The modern wrinkle here is that it's a woman instead of a man traveling across the US in the 1920s and we are treated to a different view than we've come to expect from the male protagonist stories from this era. The authors point seems to be, if you're a woman traveling with little money in a man's rough and ready world of the 1920s, well then..... you better be prepared to put out - early and often. Yes, there is a lot of sex, which on one hand it keeps me from recommending the book to younger readers or to people I don't know well. On the other hand, the author is making a novel point about the reality of of women back in the good old days which in retrospect maybe weren't so good after all. Its probably not far from the truth, if not right on. Ms Bloom does this matter of factly without railing against the whole male oppressor patriarchy thingie that the 1980s sensitized us to. It just is what it is.
Each chapter of the journey brings us a new group of characters and a new locale in a picaresque style not unlike the serialized boys adventure stories of the 20s. Maybe the author intended this - maybe its just me. Still, after a while I found it hard to keep going and I began each chapter with a feeling of "now what?" Kind of a "Perils of Pauline" feel to it. (You must pay the rent. But I cant pay the rent). Fortunately Ms. Bloom's writing style and her pithy observations about life were engaging enough to keep the story from devolving. She also kept it short and no longer than it needed to be. Here her expertise in short story writing came through. In some ways, the novel seemed like either one long short story or multiple thematically grouped short stories. But then, I like short stories, particularly for their compact writing style so this was not a disadvantage.
So even though I had some mixed feelings while I was reading the book, afterwards on balance I would say it was very much worth the read. You could do worse. It is certainly not a derivative work. Best of all it made me want to read more about the era and the locales involved particularly Stalins Zionist paradise in Tikhonaia, Siberia. Some interesting books for further reading are listed at the end.
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