Arts &Entertainment

Beach Books

The Sheer Pleasure actor

Our annual summer reading guide to some of the
new Jewish fiction and nonfiction

t interesting

_

JUDITH BOLTON-FASMAN
Special to the Jewish News

FICTION

know a book critic who rates summer reads accordirit t
their SPF: Sheer Pleasure Factor. The idea is that if you
end up both relaxed and enlightened, then the book has a
high SPF, say a 25 or 30. If you totally escape, turning
pages more quickly than the ozone layer is disintegrating, the
SPF shoots up to a 48.
The Sheer Pleasure Factor indicates that there are two kinds
of summer reading expefiences. There are classics like The Magic
Mountain or War and Peace, which presumably takea whole
summer to read. For most people, these have a low SPF factor.
This is, after all, the summer; the days may be long, but the sea-
son is much too short.
Then there are books by authors like Binnie Kirshenbaum or
Rosellen Brown — good solid reads with a high SPF factor. And,
of course, you can go beyond the ozone with Judith Krantz.
But in the end, a book's SPF is highly subjective. And determin-
ing it for yourself is one of the many pleasures of summer reading.

Half a Heart by Rosellen Brown
(Farrar Straus and Giroux; 402
pp.; $24)
- In the harsh light of the present,
the synergy of blacks and Jews who
struggled together for civil rights
often seems like a romantic dream.
Accomplished novelist Rosellen
Brown's latest work reflects on the
emotional legacy of that era.
Her story vaults from a 1960s
of empathy, anger and intimacy to
a present day of apathy, class segre-
gation and police brutality. And
yet, it ends on an uplifting note.
Protagonist Miriam Vener is the wife of a suc-
cessful doctor in Houston. She devotes herself to
her three children but moves like a sleepwalker in
an upper-middle-class Jewish social circle devoid
of politics.
As a young teacher at a black college in
Mississippi, Miriam falls in love with an accom-
plished fellow teacher, Eljay Reece. Miriam finds
herself pregnant just as Eljay is moving away from
her emotionally, caught up in a radical black power
movement that scorns her whiteness.
Far from family, outcast by fellow faculty because
of her biracial baby and rejected by Eljay, she col-
lapses in defeat when Eljay takes the baby and con-
vinces her that their child will be better off being
raised by him in the black community.
She slinks off, loses herself in the hippie move-

6/23
2000

74

ment for awhile, and then rebuilds her life as a
proper Jewish matron in the eerie sterility of the
Houston suburbs.
Eighteen years go by, and then suddenly, Veronica
Reese reappears in Miriam Vener's life. Veronica is
bound for Stanford in the fall, and it appears that
Eljay has done an excellent job raising her. But she
arrives with a secret agenda.
Is it too late for Miriam to mother this young
woman? Will Miriam have the strength to withstand
the social judgments of her Houston circle? Will
Miriam's mentsh of a husband remain steadfast as she
indulges the child of another man?
The supporting cast includes Miriam's charming
and exasperating mother, who has Alzheimer's dis-
ease; Miriam's black lesbian friend from Mississippi;
and a white teenaged friend of the family, who braves
his parents disapproval in order to date Veronica.
Brown's novel is primarily a study of characters,

but there is also plenty of sus-
pense driving the reader to a sat-
isfying denouement. Half a
Heart is that rare book, a page-
turner with emotional and politi-
cal depth.

— Reviewed by Susan Katz Miller

The Runner by Christopher Reich
(Delacorte Press; 440 pp.; $2695)
General George S. Patton
was reputedly a masterful mili-
tary strategist during World
War II whose efforts were
instrumental in the Allies'
European victory. But anyone
who knows about him beyond Hollywood and
military hagiography knows that he also was an
antisemitic loon.
He admired the Nazis way too much and kept
the Jews in the displaced persons camps under his
command in Germany in miserable conditions.
In his political thriller The Runner, Christopher
Reich asks the question: What if, on the heels of the
Allied victory, Patton were nutty enough to get a
war started against the Soviet Union? Teaming
American troops with a rearmed Wehrmacht, he
hires a fanatic SS officer to touch it off by assassinat-
ing Truman and Churchill.
The putative hero of the story is Devlin Parnell
Judge, a former cop and now a high-powered attor-
ney, commissioned after V-E Day to help interrogate
members of the Nazi High Command. His real
motive in traveling to Europe is to find out who
killed his brother, who was lined up and shot in cold

