A rage against age… and society
Two items to check off before dying: (a) publish a book, and (b) abandon predictability for adventure.
In his debut novel, 90-year-old Millard Kaufman takes out both birds with one stone. At an age when passive reflection would come easier, Kaufman instead introduces Judd Breslau, a young mash-up of Dr. Gonzo, Indiana Jones and Holden Caulfield who abandons life at Yale and falls in with the Egyptologist crowd, who offer infatuation and an invitation to rewrite history— “Wouldn’t you like to be part of our effort? Incubating a revolution to redesign human society?” From then on, cocky first-person pessimism and a cast of strange names (General Qazwini, Reverend Doctor Dewey Lipgloss) lead him toward death row in the Middle East, and his damsel is also in distress.
The wordy history lessons, dated slang and extraneous narration (“He nodded sagely and said in that sinewy voice…”) are mostly forgivable, as Kaufman works hard to recapture the fury of youth.
It’ll be a trip to see what he writes at 95.