Last day of the year so I should tell you what I think of the 2022 Pulitzer prize winner, the Netanyahus having found it a great escape from reality for the past few days.  

What a mixture of contemporary college life with the life of the fifties! I kept criticizing details while enjoying the whole.  But it was only at a point in the middle that I had to shout out to Ezi that there were deep truths buried here.  

That was the moment when the Netanyahu boys were watching westerns on TV.  Because I always say that Meir Kahane learned his politics from Hopalong Cassiday and the settlers circling their wagons against the bloodthirsty Indians.  But Gunsmoke and the later westerns had a little more humanity in them and Bibi didn’t learn that from them.  

It was also the blending of Harold Bloom with the narrator I found strange, and the partial need to straighten out the truth and the fiction at the end of the book.  It feels like he was hounding people to get his kind of information from them and they (rightly) wouldn’t comply because they knew he would be ‘using’ them.  

He’s a great writer, Joshua Cohen, but I really hope he focuses on something else next time.  

But yes, it is rollicking funny. And except for Lawrence Durell, the first author I couldn’t put down until the end.    

Want something to read?  Read “The Weight of Ink.”  Even that one feels more unified and ultimately truthful.