Gilmore’s second novel explores the lost ideals of a family once politically committed to making the world better. In Washington, D.C., in 1979, Dennis Goldstein toils in a government job he doesn’t believe in; his wife attends self-actualization seminars; and rebellion is left to their children, one of whom is off to college, where he starts delving into his grandfather’s Communist past. “ ‘Something Red’ is a delectable time capsule,” Susann Cokal wrote.

Something Red is a Jewcy Top Ten Fiction Book 2010

Something Red is a finalist for Salon’s Good Sex Awards

In this week’s Yid Lit Podcast, Jennifer Gilmore discusses family, the state of the Jewish American dream and the worst thing a Jewish girl can do.

Download the podcast here.

By Susan Shreve
Saturday, May 15, 2010; C03

SOMETHING RED

By Jennifer Gilmore

Scribner. 306 pp. $25

“Something Red,” Jennifer Gilmore’s second novel (after “Golden Country”), chronicles in striking detail seven months in the lives of the Goldsteins, former activists and ’60s optimists whose diminished dreams reflect the disillusionment and ennui at the end of the Carter administration. The book begins in late summer, 1979, when the Goldstein family members have come together for dinner in the back yard of their Chevy Chase house to see Ben, their sex-crazed, druggy, athletic son, off to Brandeis. In this wonderfully funny and compelling story of a splintering suburban family, Gilmore has written an intimate social history of three generations of American Jews.

What the Goldsteins — Sharon, the mother, and Dennis, the father — long to recover is a sense of purpose and idealism, a belief in the value of the individual, which they had in their youth before Watergate and the failure in Vietnam, the loss of trust in government and in one another. The Goldstein family, like so many others of the time, is in crisis.

The story moves seamlessly from one relative to the next, from memory to memory, flashback to flashback, and always in the background is the political climate of the present: the Cold War, the Iran hostage crisis and the grain embargo, which affects Dennis’s work at the Department of Agriculture. And shadowing their lives is the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (Dennis grew up in the neighborhood where Ethel’s mother lived, where the little boys were sent when their parents went to prison). Subtly, this is also a story about espionage, from which the title comes: I spy with my little eye . . . something red.

In the months that follow Ben’s departure, Sharon, feeling trapped in a fading marriage, disappointed in a life that has lost the excitement of youthful protest, throws herself into her catering business for Democratic fundraisers and joins a self-actualizing program called LEAP!, where she meets and has an affair with a homeless ex-hippie. She is a “get it done” woman, though in the process of rebuilding her life, she’s blind to her daughter Vanessa’s bulimia and her husband’s vulnerability.

But Sharon provides the food, both actual and spiritual, for making things happen. In fact, there’s a lot about food in the Goldsteins’ story, whether it’s the grain embargo or grandmother’s dreadful meringue cookies or Sharon’s artistry as a caterer or Vanessa’s habit of gorging herself and then throwing up. In perhaps the most memorable scene, Sharon is flambéing cherries at a catering job and sets herself on fire when she sees Vanessa, a fill-in waitress at the party, crouched in the bushes stuffing her mouth with lamb and potatoes.

Vanessa is infuriating — self-indulgent, joyless but also the most honest and heartbreaking of the Goldsteins with her empty sexual encounters, her desperation and her hopelessness. As the book progresses, she develops mettle, and the reader gets a sense that she’s not as lost as she seems, nor as disconnected.

The nuclear family comes together without actually being together in the spring, for Parents’ Day at Brandeis. Ben, who never wanted his parents to visit, is busy with demonstrations against the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Sharon and Dennis find themselves alone for the evening, dinner plans aborted while their children go to an LSD party.

A series of surprising developments carries the story to a disturbing conclusion. Late in the book, Sharon thinks: “They had always believed that what they would pass down to their children was not the good fortune their parents had fought for and handed them readily, but the intangible splendor of hope and dreaming.”

“Something Red” is an ambitious novel, though too exhaustive in detail and with an excess of back story that occasionally detracts from the characters. But that is a minor flaw in a warm, intelligent story about the dangers to a family as it tries to hold together in a dark political time.

Shreve’s latest novel is “A Student of Living Things.”

Jennifer Gilmore’s latest novel grapples with the legacy of Jewish radicalism in the late 20th century

BY ADAM KIRSCH

Is it too soon to say that the Brandeis novel is having a moment? It is, at least, an intriguing coincidence that two novels published recently are set at Brandeis University in the 1970s and that both feature a comically ineffectual campus protest. In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God ^[1], which came out at the beginning of this year, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein thinly disguised the school as Frankfurter University (Brandeis was the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Frankfurter the second) and joked about a student uprising against the introduction of fraternities and sororities. Taking a cue from some earlier Jews who didn’t like the Greek system, Goldstein’s protesters call themselves Maccabees.

Politics and protest are far more central to Something Red, the new novel byJennifer Gilmore ^[2], but she too conceives of a Brandeis uprising as something inherently comical. Early in the book, Benji Goldstein, the athlete son of a liberal D.C. clan, stumbles into a ragged rally on the Waltham campus—actually a counterprotest, in which a few students are opposing a larger student movement to ban nonkosher food from the dining halls. Here Benji meets Rachel Feinglass—“olive-skinned, black-haired, short, big-breasted”—who is sufficiently political to fight for the right of Jewish students to eat pork, even though she herself is a vegetarian. “This is about truth, about what this university is supposed to stand for. This is a participatory democracy,” she harangues, and Benji is more than convinced. On the spot, he falls in love with Rachel, with Brandeis, and with the idea of radical protest, all of which are mixed up in his inarticulate but heartfelt declaration, “I fucking love college.”

Of course, student demonstrations at Brandeis were not always so silly. In the 1960s, Benji learns in his class “American Protest!” (the exclamation point is a nice touch), the school produced radicals like Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis. But Gilmore’s novel is set in 1979—the year of the Iran hostage crisis and President Carter’s grain embargo on the Soviet Union—and all that remains of the ’60s spirit is the Grateful Dead and dropping acid. “Each and every day Benji sat in a lecture, he wished he’d been born a decade and a half previously,” Gilmore writes, and this sense of belatedness is the real theme of Something Red. Can Jews in the 1970s—and by implication, in our own time—really lay claim to the legacy of Jewish radicalism that dates back to the early 20th century?

For the Goldstein family, this is not just an abstract question. Sigmund, Benji’s grandfather, came out of the radical forcing-house that was City College in the 1930s and spent his youth as a socialist organizer. Even now he refuses to move away from the Lower East Side, out of a sense of solidarity with his poor neighbors, who are no longer Jewish but Asian and Latino. But Sigmund’s politics, Gilmore shows, long ago seemed obsolete to his son Dennis, who was born in the late 1930s, making him just too old to participate fully in the Sixties counterculture. Dennis, a mid-level official in Department of Agriculture, went to marches on the Mall—for civil rights, against Vietnam—but he always took his wife, Sharon, and his children, Benji and Vanessa, with him. Living in suburban Washington, working for the government, he was part of the system his father tried to overthrow:

Didn’t he think of his father watching him as he sat at his desk, waiting for his administrative instructions? Brief this one, brief that one. Toe the party line. … It was confusing to him: working from within the government was both the most benevolently liberal thing he could do, the most socialist really; had the last gasp of the sixties not been evidence of this? So why now did government work feel sometimes to Dennis like the most conservative anti-individual, anti-independent thinking move he could have made? Where did he stand?

If there is a wrong note in this soliloquy, it is the word “socialist.” No child of a radical like Sigmund, no one who lived through the 1960s, would think of working in the Department of Agriculture as a contribution to socialism. For someone like Dennis, that word would have much more radical and revolutionary implications than it apparently does for Gilmore, who treats it as simply a superlative of liberal. This kind of uncertainty frequently plagues Gilmore’s treatment of Jewish-American politics—above all when it comes to Sigmund, his Russian-born wife Tatiana, and their lives in the 1930s. Trying to parse Sigmund’s biography, based on the references he makes, is quite impossible, because the novel does not have a firm grasp on that complex period. Thus we hear that Sigmund was a Trotskyist, a Communist Party member, and a supporter of the Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, all apparently at the same time—though these were three distinct political orientations that would have been quite incompatible in the ideologically fractured 1930s.

In this way, ironically, Something Red enacts the very phenomenon it means to describe: contemporary Jews’ loss of connection with their radical past. The closer Gilmore comes to her own generation, by contrast—she graduated from Brandeis in 1992, about a decade after Benji was there—the more authentic and compelling her observations become. For Benji and his younger sister Vanessa—who is still stuck at home, full of teenage rebellion and anguish—music meets all the needs that politics did for Sigmund. When Benji gets high at a Dead concert, he experiences his own kind of classless society: “Benji was instantly drawn to the sense of community and understanding, this insular world that shirked all preconceived notions of what happened outside it. From the moment he stepped into the Coliseum parking lot before the music started: happiness unadulterated. Pure utopia.”

Utopia, for the 1930s radicals, meant social transformation, which required organizing, indoctrination, and violent revolution; for Benji in the 1970s, it means personal transformation, totally subjective and hedonistic. For Vanessa, who is drawn to the Straight Edge punk lifestyle—no drugs or alcohol, just loud ugly music in packed clubs—community is apolitical in a different way: “Shirtless boys slammed into one another, bodies so thin and lanky she could see their blue hearts beating through their chests. There was no way to be separate. This was real protest music, Vanessa thought. …  It did something, and it did it close to your face.” For Benji and Vanessa’s mother, Sharon, an equally ersatz community is found in a self-actualization cult called LEAP, where she goes in search of the inspiration that politics and religion no longer provide.

Gilmore writes with affection and authority about the early D.C. punk scene—she knows Madam’s Organ and the Slickee Boys better than she knows the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and the Rosenberg case. And Vanessa, with her wholly personal struggles—against her mother, her peers, her own body—emerges as the best-drawn character in Something Red. Partly this is because, when writing about Vanessa, Gilmore is able to lose herself in the intimate evocations of suburban childhood that are the novel’s best passages. Compared to these, the plot involving Dennis Goldstein’s business trips to Moscow, and the sudden revelation of a spy in the family, feel awkwardly contrived. As Gilmore shows, political passion comes and goes in historical cycles, and Something Red is clearly the product of a time when the private has a greater hold on our imagination than the public.

In a series of overlapping character sketches, Gilmore maps the Goldsteins’ interior lives as they test alternative outlets for their zeal-sex, drugs, the Grateful Dead, bulimia, pyramid schemes, espionage-and come up empty even as son Benji, inspired by his Russian grandparents, discovers activism afresh in protesting the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycott.

“Benji thought of his father,” writes Gilmore, who grew up in Washington, “holding him up into the intense sunshine, Peter, Paul, and Mary singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. . . . now it was his turn.”

By Drew Bratcher

Set during the Cold War of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Jennifer Gilmore’s second novel is the mostly successful story of a Jewish family, the Goldsteins, affected and disaffected by the politics, fashion and trends of the times.

The United States is still mending itself after the end of the Vietnam War. Iran holds Americans hostage. After the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, the Carter administration calls for an ill-advised grain embargo against the USSR, and it announces the U.S. will boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow.

As political and social trends in the U.S. in the 1980s continually change, so does the Goldstein family. Sharon, the mother, has given up her ’60s protest days for a life as a dinner caterer to the Washington wealthy and powerful. She’s married to Dennis, also a spirit from the ’60s, who now works for the Foreign Agriculture service. His job often takes him to the Soviet Union.

Dennis and Sharon cater, if you will, to this ’80s way of life, but Sharon still puts up a fight. She belongs to LEAP!, a cultish support group. Both regret never becoming the full-fledged hippie activists they might have been. Their son, Ben, once a high school jock who dated cheerleaders, is now hip, acid-dropping Benji. He’s in his first year at Brandeis, home of political protesters, including Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman. He’s looking for an important cause to protest, but settles for protesting America’s planned boycott of the Olympics.

Vanessa, Benji’s sister, has gone from being a naïve schoolgirl who listened to the Carpenters to sometime punk rocker, sometime Straight Edger (a punk subculture that embraced clean living). Grandpa Sigmund is a socialist, nostalgic about mother Russia and Trotsky, and a protester role model to Benji. Sigmund is married to seemingly harmless Tatiana from St. Petersburg. To Dennis, she seems the embodiment of Russia.

Characters are developed in a leisurely, but sometimes painfully slow way. We learn about each through slow-moving flashbacks, half scenes and shifting points of view. Sometimes the story gets bogged in rather mundane character portraits, but “Something Red” is something you should read.

–Joseph Peschel

–Sue Corbett, People Magazine