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Last update - 14:02 21/05/2008 Fiction Witnesses to history By Sarah Wildman Tags: gays, Swarthmore  The Book of Getting Even,by Benjamin Taylor Steerforth Press, 166 pages, $23.75 Gabriel Geismar is a 20th-century hero with a 21st-century perspective. He's a tail-end baby boomer, defined and bounded by the events of his generation, coming of age at the beginning of the 1970s, always casting an eye back to his parents' generation, but blessed with a profession that propels him ever forward into the future. Gabriel's experience binds the family narratives of Benjamin Taylor's "The Book of Getting Even," a quietly triumphant novel that spans the decade in which Gabriel becomes an adult -- 1970-1980 -- and manages to be both of that time period and very much beyond it. The son of an abusive rabbi who is gorgeously beneficent to his congregation and an "ogre" at home, Gabriel is a gay, Jewish, intellectual teen from New Orleans, and if it that sounds like a potentially difficult identity to have in 2008, imagine how much more so it would have been in 1970. Yet Gabriel, for all his determination to run away from his family, is at ease with himself from the outset of the novel. Gabriel is established early on as a man who knows he wants three things: to escape steamy New Orleans, his oppressive father and a mother who only communicates her own dismay through a "repertory of somatic protest: ulcers, anemia, facial neuralgias, tachycardia, stones everywhere" -- for the cool lucidity of the North and Swarthmore College; to dive as far as possible into that which calms him -- science, specifically astronomy; and to enjoy those male carnal pleasures wherever he might find them. He seems to have no trouble meeting any of the three goals. Taylor, writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis, and author of the 1995 novel "Tales Out of School," likes to set his characters in time and space. Throughout we are reminded, Forrest Gump-like, of what exactly is happening elsewhere, on a bigger stage. Take the third week of August, 1970. "To get the public facts out of the way," he writes, "the previous week Janis Joplin had flown home for her 10th high-school reunion ... By the banks of the Pedernales former President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson enjoyed a private screening of 'Patton'... And soon at Tan Son Nhut airfield, Spiro Agnew would praise the South Vietnamese for 'suffering so much in freedom's cause.'" The events in Southeast Asia, so far from the quiet locations of this book -- in the central narrative many of the scenes feel ripe for stage adaptation, taking place in rural locales like Wisconsin, or inside restaurants, and rarely in the street or on the run -- spark a brace of anti-war events, and indeed the atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos then serve as a sort of funhouse mirror of American policy in World War II. The strands of the decade -- wars, films, adulthood, childhood, sexuality, mental health and aging -- are continuously braided throughout the text. This is definitively a book about the 1970s and not the 1960s: The blinders are off, there is healthy skepticism about the efficacy of protest, about the direction of the country. Upon arrival at Swarthmore, Gabriel immediately plunges into another family, falling in love with a set of older fraternal twins, Marghie and Daniel Hundert (the latter briefly becomes his lover), and their parents, Gregor and Lila Hundert. Gregor is a composite character, fictitious (but only barely), a member of the "Hungarian 8" -- a group of Jewish scientists from Budapest, refugees from the Nazis. "Jewish by chance?" The scientist asks rhetorically, parrying Gabriel's slightly aggressive question at their very first meal together, as to whether these nuclear scientists were "coincidentally" all Jewish exiles. "No, no, inewitably Jewish," he answers himself, in his Eastern European accent. In Hungary, he explained, "the only intelligentsia there was there was Jewish." Taylor imagines the imaginary "Hungarian 8" as an essential cog within J. Robert Oppenheimer's very real Manhattan Project, in New Mexico, and Gregor, nearly 30 years on, continues to believes his work in helping to develop the bomb saved the world from further carnage. His peacenik children heartily disagree, but Gabriel is enchanted, and adopts these cultured travelers as his own parents, weaving himself into their summer plans, enrolling in graduate school near them. He never really looks back at his family: His father dies and his mother becomes little more than a briefly mentioned caricature, playing canasta and going on kosher, and then non-kosher, cruises with other widows. It's a strange, slight oversight of the narrative. The Hunderts and even their closest friends, Ned and Elise Dunallen, are richly drawn, with well-drawn back stories that explain late-in-life idiosyncrasies, as though to say: Indeed, these adults were once just as crazy, just as loose and carefree in their time. Only Gabriel's poor parents are left behind, slightly more than two-dimensional, not quite three. Yet despite this, the book is a major achievement, a strong smart book that is defined by ethnic American identity -- Jewish, yes, but also Hungarian and American; intellectual, literary, and scientific. This is a picture of a small, bounded world, which becomes more and more porous as the 1970s wear on, a group of people who bear the impact of the 20th century, and then live mostly regular small lives. Taylor's draws with a free hand gorgeous, full descriptions of his characters. Take Marghie, who was "light-boned and rosy, arresting to look at with head of hair of red and auburn, sun-bleached at the crown. Helplessly she'd push it behind her ears, only to have the paler locks fall forward. She'd push it back. Her hair kept her busy. On her wrist was a man's watch, an outsize battered Longines." But he is equally skillful in capturing a moment. When Gabriel goes home to the house he grew up in for a final time, to bury his mother and dismantle her possessions, he finds the detritus not just of his parents' lives but of his too: every letter he'd ever written, every award he'd ever won, his baby teeth, his baby shoes, his merit badges and his report cards. "All the while he'd thought they were heaping him, overwhelming him, it was he who'd heaped them. His archivists is what they'd been, protecting all this stuff." As the novel progresses, Taylor becomes more adept, with ever more sly references to events outside his characters. When Gabriel and his boyfriend are invited in 1977 to see the "greatest choreographer who ever lived" in a New York City taken by ballet mania, it is a quiet allusion to Balanchine. When Danny's anti-war silent protest becomes a way of life -- and before it becomes a danger -- the Hunderts take comfort in the fact that elsewhere, "other people's children were firebombing ROTC buildings, when not setting off devices accidentally in the basements of Greenwich Village townhouses, or being shot dead by National Guardsmen." But as Gabriel discovers, fully adopting another family means taking on their secrets, their anger, their misdeeds and their foibles. Even as he becomes a professor of science, he is forever caught in a non-scientific conundrum. "Nothing is foreseeable," he repeats to himself, mantra-like, trying to decipher his own future, "everything is all right." Sarah Wildman is a journalist whose work appears frequently in The New York Times and the Guardian. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Fear of extinction The state of over 20 species of birds in Israel has worsened considerably. Taking advantage Jerusalem police probe possible gang rape of disabled woman.

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