Thrilling, Lush New Historical Fiction

New York Times

28-03-2025

Fagin the Thief
You might be surprised to learn that Oliver Twist has nothing more than a walk-on part in FAGIN THE THIEF (Doubleday, 321 pp., $28). And even more surprised to learn that Dickens's notorious villain emerges from this reimagining of his origins as somewhat less villainous — still a sinister master criminal, but indelibly shaped by the prejudices of 19th-century London, where even as a boy he suffers 'the natural consequence of being visibly Jewish and visibly poor.'
The narrative begins with a nod to Dickens's novel, introducing us to a coldblooded middle-aged Fagin as he directs his gang of child pickpockets. Then, in flashbacks that intersect with some of what we remember from Dickens, we're shown how Fagin got that way: his own youthful apprenticeship to a flamboyant thief, the terrible illness that killed his widowed mother, his professional partnering with warmhearted Nan Reed and her ill-fated attraction to his former pupil Bill Sikes, whose bond with Fagin has morphed into a 'creeping cancer he called a friendship.'
In an author's note, Epstein considers the most common ways that modern adaptations of Dickens have dealt with the antisemitic 'Fagin problem,' remarking that 'both of these options — sanitizing Fagin or disowning him — feel like a loss to me.' Instead she has created a deeply nuanced character, understandable if not wildly sympathetic, a loner who has learned a tragic lesson: 'Iron hearts can't break.'
The Delicate Beast
'The bliss and the brutality' of a childhood in early-1960s Haiti are portrayed with dreamlike, then nightmarish, eloquence in Celestin's autobiographical first novel, THE DELICATE BEAST (Bellevue Literary Press, 431 pp., paperback, $18.99). There's a mythic feel to the larger context — the setting is known only as the Tropical Republic and Papa Doc Duvalier as the Mortician — which makes the precise detail of this depiction of a young boy's privileged yet fragile life in a large upper-class family even more effective.
As the Mortician consolidates power, the routines of the family's days 'seem infinite even as they are coming to an end' in an onslaught of violence that will send the boy's parents into hiding, then impoverished exile. After he and his brother join them in New York, the novel opens out into a more conventional consideration of rootlessness and alienation. The previously unnamed boy grows into a man, Robert Carpentier, but as he travels through Europe, establishes a career in academia and separates from his family he never entirely succeeds in walling off the past. 'There was no second chance,' he ruefully concludes when the hoped-for shelter of his marriage crumbles, 'no possibility of a life empty of damage.'
A Fool's Kabbalah
In A FOOL'S KABBALAH (Melville House, 287 pp., paperback, $19.99), Stern sets the post-World War II activities of the real-life scholar Gershom Scholem, famed for his study of Jewish mysticism, against the wartime antics of a fictional 'shtetl scapegrace' named Menke Klepfisch, whose remote village on the Polish border succumbs to the occupying forces of the Reich. Scholem has been tasked by the Treasures of Diaspora Archive in Jerusalem with procuring whatever books and artifacts have survived the carnage in Europe. Menke is an inveterate clown whose life — and death — challenge conventional attempts to confront the horror of the Holocaust.
Both alternating narratives are steeped in a poignant form of gallows humor. While Scholem struggles with bureaucrats and kleptocrats and conspires to smuggle a shipload of books across the Mediterranean, Menke engages in increasingly futile high jinks, attempting to distract the Nazis from their depredations. But when he and the village's other Jews face imminent destruction, they retreat into a bizarre kind of magical thinking. How will the terror-filled superstitions of their last days align with the academic theories advanced by Scholem, who could pass as 'a religious anarchist,' possessed of an 'orthodox nihilism'?
Moral Treatment
The vacant grounds of the Northern Michigan Asylum in Traverse City were a frequent childhood haunt of Carpenter, whose first novel, MORAL TREATMENT (Central Michigan University Press, 367 pp., paperback, $19.95), vividly recreates one late-19th-century year of its existence as a public institution for the mentally ill. The tensions that ripple through its cluster of buildings are revealed from the perspectives of two characters on opposite sides of the doors to the locked wards: a teenage girl with a penchant for self-harm and the elderly hospital superintendent, whose theories are being challenged by younger, more interventionist physicians.
The dynamic between the staff members and their patients is particularly complex and convincing. This is a place where humane 'moral treatment' is emphasized, where a predictable routine, healthy food, satisfying work and regular exercise are believed to be the best route to a cure. But the superintendent is forced to acknowledge the challenge posed by certain hardened residents, who may lead their more vulnerable companions astray. These friendships could easily be more harmful than helpful — especially when the opposite sex is involved.