{"id":9476,"date":"2022-06-17T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-17T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9476"},"modified":"2022-06-16T22:47:09","modified_gmt":"2022-06-17T02:47:09","slug":"the-netanyahus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/17\/the-netanyahus\/","title":{"rendered":"The Netanyahus."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Joshua Cohen won this year\u2019s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his short novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family<\/a><\/em>, which fictionalizes a real event involving Benjamin Netanyahu and his father, the Zionist historian Benzion Netanyahu, visiting Cornell University and the esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom. This is a travesty; in a year with several better books (at least two by Black authors), the selection of such an unfunny, narrow work for the highest honor in American literature undermines the award and robs more deserving books of attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is narrated as a memory by a professor from Corbindale College in upstate New York, a badly disguised stand-in for Cornell, who is chosen to be on the committee to interview the senior Netanyahu for a faculty position because he\u2019s the only Jewish professor in the department. They expect Benzion to show up alone, but instead, he brings his wife and three unruly children \u2013 Benji, the middle one; Yonatan, who would later die a hero in the raid on Entebbe; and Iddo, who\u2019d later become a physician, author, playwright. Benzion doesn\u2019t actually reach Corbindale until the middle of the novel, so the first half is the sort of insular follies that made Netflix\u2019s The Chair<\/em> a modest hit among academics, as well as a portrait of the casual anti-Semitism of the late 1960s. Then the Netanyahus show up and trash everything, including the novel itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The entire family, in the book at least, sucks. The father is an intellectual, a strong Zionist who makes compelling arguments on the pages, but he\u2019s also a selfish asshole. His wife is worse, and invites her entire family to stay with the protagonist, whose wife wants no part of this (nor should she). The two older boys are assholes, not just in the way that most teenaged boys are, but with a spectacular lack of self-awareness. I suppose Iddo is the least offensive of the bunch, but the point is that these are deeply unlikeable, one-dimensional characters who suffocate the last half of the novel with their presence, and add nothing to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cohen\u2019s writing is insufferably pretentious, right down to his frequent, deliberate choices of uselessly esoteric vocabulary words. Writing of a character \u201cknowing at some chthonic lake-depth that \u2026\u201d is pointless, just a way to send the reader to the dictionary to show off your own linguistic prowess. (It means \u201crelating to the underworld.\u201d \u201cAbyssal\u201d would have worked better here, or just saying \u201cknowing at the deepest level of his subconscious,\u201d which uses words any middle school student could understand.) Another passage goes \u201clogopoeic, propaedeutic,\u201d using words only an academic might know and love \u2013 more on that in a moment. \u201cNugatory\u201d does not, in fact, refer to the center of your 3 Musketeers bar, but is the rare word that describes itself: of no value or importance. In other words, worthless. The word Cohen needed was \u201cworthless,\u201d but he chose the more difficult one. The entire book is like this, and it is a work of supreme arrogance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

So why the heck did it win the Pulitzer? It\u2019s not actually funny. The story is small and unremarkable, and the themes are fairly narrow. But it is a book about academia, and about Harold Bloom. At least 30% of the Pulitzer Prize Board for 2022 comprises current professors or Deans. The majority of the Board are current or former writers who would probably all be familiar with Bloom\u2019s work. This is a book for them and about them. It\u2019s The Artist<\/em> and Argo<\/em> telling Hollywood that movies are important. The Netanyahus<\/em> puts a fancypants college at the center of its narrative, and takes one of the great critics and historians of literature and makes him the protagonist. The Board probably couldn\u2019t resist. I can\u2019t think of another explanation \u2013 I\u2019ve read all of the Pulitzer winners, and this is the worst choice in at least 25 years. I found nothing at all redeeming in The Netanyahus<\/em> except that it\u2019s short. There were so many better books right in front of them \u2013 Hell of a Book<\/a><\/em> won the National Book Award for Fiction and The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois<\/a><\/em> won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, so they weren\u2019t obscure, and both were miles and miles better than this thing. Patricia Lockwood\u2019s No One Is Talking About This<\/a><\/em> made the Booker Prize shortlist, and it\u2019s better and far more relevant to our current moment. Colson Whitehead\u2019s Harlem Shuffle<\/a><\/em> and Torrey Peters\u2019 Detransition, Baby<\/a><\/em> were better. And that\u2019s just among novels I read. I know it\u2019s just a prize that doesn\u2019t make the novels considered any better or worse, but these awards drive sales, and I\u2019d rather see a better book get that big sales bump than this nonsense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Alan Hollinghurst\u2019s The Line of Beauty<\/a><\/em>, a Booker Prize winner from 2004.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joshua Cohen won this year\u2019s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his short novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which fictionalizes a real event involving Benjamin Netanyahu and his father, the Zionist historian Benzion Netanyahu, visiting Cornell University and the esteemed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,866,102,178,252],"class_list":["post-9476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-literature","tag-contemporary-literature","tag-disappointments","tag-jewish-american-literature","tag-pulitzer-prize","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9476"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9477,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9476\/revisions\/9477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}