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A Long Island Story
Canongate, £16.99 Reviewed by David Herman
RICK GEKOSKI had an interesting career as an academic, rare-book dealer and non-fiction author. Then, last year, in his mid-70s, he wrote his first novel, Darke. He has followed that up with A Long Island Story, about a troubled Jewish family, the Grossmans, during the blisteringly hot summer of 1953.
The Grossmans are in trouble. Ben Grossman works as a lawyer at the Department of Justice at the height of McCarthyism. The prob-
Rick Gekoski: an enjoyable read lem is he’s a Jewish communist and he and his wife, Addie, are planning to jump ship before he loses his job or gets into worse trouble.
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible has just opened and they can read the signs. They are planning to move to the suburbs in Long Island and live near Addie’s parents, Maurice Kaufmann and his wife Perle, but it isn’t as easy as it sounds. “We are under a lot of pressure,” Ben tells his mother-inlaw, “about work, where to live, when to move, how to make a living — all at the same time.”
As if this isn’t enough pressure, their marriage is coming apart. Ben is a frustrated, would-be writer, who once wrote a novel that was rejected by everyone. Addie is a depressed and unhappy housewife beginning to turn to tranquillisers. Even her mother thinks Addie “had kvetched her life away, from child to grown woman, demanding, self-referring, petulant.” Ben drops his wife and children off with her parents and returns to work in Washington. That’s when their problems really start.
Addie’s father, Maurice, has his own problems. At first glance, he seems an easy-go-lucky immigrant from the old country, “vital, jolly and warm.” And, while Ben and Addie struggle to pay the bills, Mo regularly hands out big, brown-paper bags full of cash. But where does all this mysterious money come from?
A Long Island Story is an enjoyable read. Gekoski has a good feel for the place and time he grew up in and there’s enough suspense to keep you turning the pages.
But, unfortunately, none of the characters is terribly likeable. Maurice is full of life but he’s an amiable shyster, Ben is not as smart as his CV and Addie is an uninteresting shrew. More importantly, there’s no political bite to the story. We are a long way from the fantastic Roy Cohn character in Angels in America or films like Trumbo or The Front.
David Herman is the JC’s senior fiction reviewer
book about the man he has advised for over three decades, The Murdoch Method: Notes on Running an Empire, (Atlantic, £20) is so fascinating. Less a straightforward biography than reflections on Murdoch’s life and career, Stelzer seeks to identify the “Murdoch Method”.
It is a method that has created an empire with more than 100,000 employees and annual revenue of $36 billion (in 2017).
Even Stelzer’s asides bring insight. The story of how Murdoch’s obsession with Sky came within hours of destroying that empire is well known, for example, but Stelzer points out that Murdoch was known for always keeping his word — a trait that many of his rivals did not share and that often worked to his advantage.
It is ironic that one of the causes of the hatred for Murdoch is his role in breaking the print unions in the Wapping dispute. But their corrupt and damaging grip on Fleet Street had to be broken if newspapers were to have a future.
Murdoch, in other words, saved not only his own papers but an entire industry. I, for one, am grateful. STEPHEN POLLARD
Irwin Stelzer
Arthur Miller’s
has opened and they can read the signs