"The Book of Getting Even": Young man's tale fascinates, until he graduates

"The Book of Getting Even"

by Benjamin Taylor

Steerforth, 166 pp., $23.95

Benjamin Taylor's "The Book of Getting Even" is elegant and beautifully evoked, right down to the pediatrician — "the worst, the noisiest Nixon-lover in town" — who appears only in a couple of paragraphs. Set in the 1970s, "Book" follows brilliant, odd Gabriel Geismar, a kid with — literally — two left thumbs and a passion for mathematics, as he leaves his home in the South and heads for college in Philadelphia.

Gabriel is a rabbi's son who grows up in a New Orleans household ruled by his handsome, tyrannical father, who saves all his charm for strangers. At home, his tirades are awful but also funny and cartoonish. "He'd carry on in third person, like a sports hero or gangster: 'Tell a lie to Milton Geismar? You'll wish you hadn't!' "

On Gabriel's last night before leaving for college, he determinedly loses his virginity in a dim cubicle at a gay bathhouse, with eager Clarence Rappley, cold-heartedly described as a "king-sized cracker." After their brief encounter, Gabriel stills his racing mind with a foray into mathematics: "His mind veered to numbers, clean things, the cleanest indeed anywhere in or out of the world." It is a theme — the lifelong duel between mind and body — that resonates through the novel.

At Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, Gabriel meets the eccentric, irresistible brother-sister twins, Marghie and Daniel Hundert, who both fall in love with him. This strange, powerful triangle offers him everything he lacks: Danny and Marghie's parents are literate, worldly, opera-loving Hungarian émigrés — everything Gabriel's family isn't. Their father, to Gabriel's amazement, is a Nobel laureate. Gabriel quickly incorporates himself into the family.

This section, charting Gabriel's growing intoxication with the Hunderts, is the best in the book. The time and place are captured with aching perfection. But as the story moves on — Taylor divides it into sections taking place several years apart — it begins to come off the rails, largely because of Danny's disappearance from center stage.

An effortlessly charming college kid when we first meet him, Danny abruptly becomes an angry political activist — a transformation in tune with the times, but not one that's ever satisfactorily explained or explored. Like all 1970s activists worth their salt, Danny has a manifesto — his is the titular "Book of Getting Even." Unfortunately, it's unpersuasive, like the post-college sections of the novel. And while Taylor's story ultimately doesn't completely satisfy, his considerable gifts as a writer make it worthwhile.