Review: What to Do about the Solomons

What to Do about the Solomons by Bethany Ball
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one seems to have my name written on it. When a friend saw it was a multi-generation saga about Jews who get caught up in crime, she practically assigned it to me. (Thanks, Maya.)

That description doesn’t quite fit the story, though. It is multi-generational, it is Jews, and someone is accused of crime (but, as the dust jacket goes on to say, it’s a false accusation.) Instead, it’s about a tangled extended family, one where everyone seems fairly screwed up. But, as I said, it’s Jews.

I had some difficulty settling into the rhythm here and, while I may never have actually grown comfortable with it, I wound up admiring it for that original rhythm as much as anything. This is, from the start and more or less throughout, frenetic. The scenes are short, and the sentences rapid fire. Ball rarely stops for exposition, and she assumes a family structure that everyone should know. That’s hard to follow, but it does feel true-to-life. I doubt I could have made sense of this if I’d listened to it because I often had to stop my reading to flip back a couple pages or to consult the helpful family tree in the opening pages.

As it stands, though, we get four generations of an Israeli, sometimes U.S. family. The patriarch, Yakov Solomon, has managed to help his kibbutz grow into a massive business. He’s gone from child of the Israeli War of Independence to socialist, to compulsive womanizer and controlling older figure.

His various children live in his shadow. A son-in-law is torn between his dreams of being an artist and his sense of obligation to the kibbutz. His youngest son has built a financial empire in California but gets double-crossed by an old friend. And then [SPOILER:] he never learns that he’s been kept from his childhood sweetheart because she is secretly his half-sister. And another son is disappointed in his life (along with some of Yakov’s brothers.)

Put like that, this feels like soap opera, but that doesn’t quite describe the effect. Instead, Ball is trying – largely through her narrative rhythm – to give an impression of a great span of time compressed into a series of powerful moments. There are some ruts here; I think three plots involving middle-aged or older characters finding their way back to childhood loves is at least two too many. And there is some unnecessary drama. (Why fight over the family fortune if there is, really, enough for everyone?)

All of that leaves the end of this somewhat arbitrary feeling.

Still, there’s some rare ambition here. Ball is doing something substantially more difficult than any plot summary can suggest. She’s challenging narrative as we typically get it.

I don’t think this lives up the blurbs on its cover, but I do think Ball is an intriguing writer. I admire this is as an experiment and I found, the more I read of it, that I grew to enjoy the crazy even more for its tone than for what was happening.


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