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Fiction
REVIEW: ‘Fervor’
Fervor
By Toby Lloyd (Avid Reader Press)
A recent National Jewish Book Award finalist for fiction and debut fiction as well as a finalist for the Sami Rohr prize for Jewish Literature, Fervor is nevertheless challenging to categorize.
The novel from Toby Lloyd is part coming-of-age story set on a college campus, part mystery and part horror novel. At its heart, the complex, dense book is a devastating saga of a family slowly falling apart.
The Rosenthals are observant Jews living in London in 1999. There are the parents: Hannah, a brash journalist, and Eric, a gentle lawyer; their three children, Gideon, Elsie and the youngest, Tovyah; and Eric’s father, Yosef, a Holocaust survivor. The intellectual and argumentative family, writes Lloyd, “mingle Orthodox tradition with a bourgeois appreciation of les beaux arts.”
Hannah publishes a controversial best-selling book about her father-in-law, including in it a secret from his time in Treblinka, upsetting her children. Shortly after Yosef passes away, Elsie disappears without a trace.
When the teenager abruptly returns several days later, Elsie refuses to say what had happened or where she had been, but she is markedly and disturbingly changed.
Among those changes is a new interest in Kabbalah and books of Jewish mysticism. She also stops eating and begins hurting herself. While praying one day, Hannah believes that God has told her that Elsie is communing with the dead.
About a decade later, when Tovyah is a student at Oxford University, Hannah completes another tell-all book, this time about Elsie, writing that she practices dark magic and is “a girl waylaid by demonic influences.” For Tovyah, however,
Elsie’s behaviors are mental health issues brought on by a dysfunctional family obsessed with both fame and Jewish ritual.
The story alternates between the voice of a (supposedly) omniscient narrator, who recounts the Rosenthal family history, and that of Kate, Tovyah’s college friend, who is newly exploring her own Jewishness. A sense of unease or strain permeates almost every page. Several characters see ghosts, yet these spectral occurrences are mentioned offhandedly and never fully explained.
Then there is the inclusion of campus tensions and Israeli politics.
It is 2008, and Israel has launched Operation Cast Lead in Gaza after Hamas launched rockets at the Jewish state. Tovyah experiences campus antisemitism, and when Kate goes to lunch with him and his mother, students on the street shout at them about Israel and apartheid.
In an interlude not integral to the story, Hannah and Kate get into a verbal tussle about Jewish history and the distinctions between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Like several other sections in the novel, it seems disjointed—at significant odds with the deeply Jewish Rosenthals and especially Hannah’s Zionism.
One could say that debates about Jewishness and anti-Zionism serve to paint the background of Tovyah’s isolation and experiences as a Jew at college, but this has already been done well in earlier parts of the book. The reader needs no additional convincing.
Fervor is a complex, fragmented and overwhelmingly sad story. The characters orbit each other with no real connection, save perhaps Tovyah and Kate, but even their connection is tentative and tenuous. In the end, there is no resolution that connects religion and mysticism, no untangling of Elsie’s demons, just a jarring and tragic dissolution of a family.
Jaime Herndon is a writer and avid reader. Her work can be found at Book Riot, Kveller and other places.
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