The Revisionist

Brian Morton

Schulman has an agreeable, funny, easy style. . .this is in large part a comic novel . . .At its best, The Revisionist is very good. It's an original, bold and often moving book . . .
— New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

David Hershleder, the 39-year-old Bellevue neurologist at the center of Schulman's sensitive but occasionally strained second novel, is watching his life unravel. His wife, Itty, has kicked him out of his expensive suburban house in Westchester and taken up with a younger man; his little son, Jonathan, has been talking in a made-up language consisting of numbers and doesn't have any friends at school; and Hershleder himself is increasingly absent-minded, haunted by memories of his life's great failures and losses, including the death of his mother, a survivor of the Nazi death camps. Into this mid-life muddle wanders the review of a 1,000-page book 'proving' that the Holocaust happened, written by a former Holocaust denier and translated by someone Hershleder used to know, David Josephson, the old college roommate of Hershleder's best friend, David Kahn. Oddly (and never quite convincingly) obsessed with the book, Hershleder journeys with Kahn to California to visit Josephson, who turns out to be an academic made paranoid by a brain injury; then all three Davids extend the road trip by taking a Paris vacation and meeting the book's author. Why? Hershleder doesn't quite know, except that 'He was curious about how a person can have the guts to rethink his life.' Schulman is a good writer who knows a certain New York Jewish idiolect to a breath's precision -- knows, also, her protagonist's masculine despairs and desires as if by heart -- but seems in search of a conceit to puff a very poignant short story into an existential, trans-Atlantic road novel. Some readers will wish she had stayed on home turf.

Library Journal

David Hershleder is a 39-year-old, Type-A, Jewish neurologist in New York City, described as being 'allergic to his patients.' His mother, a Holocaust survivor about to receive her Ph.D. in Holocaust studies, committed suicide by putting her head in the oven, doing 'what the Nazis could not do: She finished the job for them.' Hershleder is so involved in his research that he doesn't realize the precarious state of his marriage until he comes home to his Larchmont suburb one night to find that his wife has changed the locks on him. In an attempt to win back his wife and children, he looks for meaning and definition in his life. So he dips into another type of research, embarking on a project involving a Holocaust denier (hence the title). Hershleder's obsession with denial of one type or another mounts, and along with two goofy college buddies he goes off to Paris to discover his own kind of revisionist history. Schulman's fast-paced novel, filled with much humor, intelligence, and adventure, is intriguing, but using the Holocaust as a plot device to find inner meaning wears thin.--Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Maryland

Brian Morton

Schulman has an agreeable, funny, easy style. . .this is in large part a comic novel . . .[A]t its best, The Revisionist is very good. It's an original, bold and often moving book . . . -- New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Second-novelist Schulman (Out of Time) offers a tragi-comedy about a doctor whose marital problems trigger a radical re-evaluation of his entire life. David Hershleder is a 39-year-old neurologist and son of a Holocaust survivor who's going through a midlife crisis. His marriage is disintegrating. He finds it increasingly difficult to focus on his patients. He prefers to immerse himself in library research. He has the nagging feeling that he's picking up all the habits he found off-putting about his father. In a strange and circuitous attempt to revive his marriage and rediscover himself, he becomes interested in tracking down and speaking to a one-time Holocaust denier who has recently published a massive tome (translated by an old schoolfriend of Hershleder's) in which he reverses himself and declares the historical truth of the extermination of the Six Million. Accompanied by another old friend (who, like the translator, is also named David), Hershleder goes to Los Angeles and then to Paris to confront the apostate racist with the hope of discovering how it's possible to turn one's life completely around. On this slender and somewhat improbable thread, Schulman builds an intelligent, intermittently funny, but ultimately unsatisfying story whose major plot twists are too easily predictable. Although handled with seeming decency and taste, the Holocaust theme, juxtaposed with Hershleder's more mundane problems, seems forced and almost exploitative. The novel veers between a Jewish take on the Cheever-Updike world of dysfunctional suburbia (including a trick chapter ending that echoes The Swimmer) and a vaguely Philip Rothian concern with the more unpleasant manifestationsof the weakness of the flesh. Unfortunately, Schulman lacks the wry understatement of Cheever, the sheer word-drunkenness of Updike, and the overpowering brio of Roth. A minor addition to the fiction memorializing Jewish suburban-American angst.