Isaac: A Modern Fable

Publishers Weekly

In this fast-paced mashup of Faust and the biblical story of Isaac, former Los Angeles Times reporter Goldman (The Barfighter) twists the screws on a pair of star-crossed lovers as they struggle to overcome the natural and supernatural forces keeping them apart. When clever, gorgeous professor Ruth Canby meets handsome muscle-for-hire Lenny at the L.A. Farmers Market, their mutual attraction overpowers Ruth’s inhibitions. But mysterious Lenny, who is, in fact, Isaac, son of Abraham, physically young after 4,000 years and world-weary but still in love with life—throws her over to protect his secret. Hurt and disappointed, Ruth accepts a too-good-to-be-true offer to join a Columbia University think tank and tries to forget Lenny, while fending off a colleague’s advances. Back in L.A., Lenny avoids his age-old nemesis “The Beast” and attempts to forget Ruth. But he discovers that she’s in grave danger, and only a supreme sacrifice might save her. Goldman’s snappy dialogue and light touch make this sendup of West Coast superficiality, East Coast academia, and the Old Testament an entertaining read full of weighty, nuanced questions about faith, fate, and what makes life precious, even after four millennia. (Apr.)

Kirkus Reviews

Goldman's latest, following The Barfighter (2009), centers on an unlikely love story. Ruth is a beauty with a murky past--at 2, she was abandoned by her parents, and has never discovered the circumstances--who's scratching out a living as an itinerant adjunct instructor of English, roving the freeways of southern California to teach overprivileged but underethical freshmen. Lenny is…well, Lenny is the biblical Isaac, nearly sacrificed by his father, Abraham. He's been granted an eternal youth he is at pains to understand, for purposes he cannot divine, by forces he cannot identify. This state of affairs is, inevitably, as much curse as blessing, and he has no choice but to drift through the millennia, changing address and identity frequently and toiling at inconspicuous jobs like his current one in celebrity security. He and Ruth meet at an L.A. coffee shop in the embarrassing aftermath of a doomed first date Ruth arranged on the Internet. Lenny is troubled by his relatively frequent encounters of late with the strange, cruel specter he calls The Beast, who's locked horns with him often across 40 centuries, and he knows he'll soon need to move on again; this undermines the romance, and he retreats a little. Meanwhile Ruth is offered, suddenly and mysteriously--here the book jumps the rails--a job in a high-powered think tank at Columbia University. Tenure soon follows, and international fame (People! Oprah!) for a book on Mary Shelley. And then Lenny realizes that the Adonislike ex-lover who offered her the job, a scholar-celebrity named Borges, is his old nemesis The Beast. The book is most comfortable in contemporary California, and in the witty, sharp realistic mode in which Goldman has excelled previously. But when it moves either back in history or forward to New York--to grand sacrificial romance, to theological thriller--the novel falters, hews too closely to formula, and doesn't do enough with its promising premise. Ultimately disappointing, but a brief, quick-moving novel that has, especially early, its share of pungencies and pleasures.