Reviews of And the Word Was

Beatrice.com Reviewed by Joy Nicholson

One of the most beautiful things in the world is finding a great book purely by chance. For instance, you happen to be in a bookstore buying a coffee table book on Egypt for your boss's birthday, when an Ed Ruscha-esque title font catches your eye. And The Word Was, purrs the title, by Bruce Bauman. It's right there on the new fiction rack. You pick it up, intrigued, annoyed by the biblical phrase. And The Word Was seems to be about god, godlessness, quantum physics, hope, escape, fucking, New York, India, a Columbine-style massacre. You read a few sentences--and then a few more. Uh, oh--your eye catches this gravelly sentence, spoken by a Holocaust survivor, "People like you don't want to believe that I wasn't a sweet-souled mensch before Auschwitz, or a nice boychik after." You can tell this book is not going to be like other (politically correct) literary fiction books. Of course you can't afford a gift and a new hardback novel, but, well, you don't like your boss much, and besides, you are a bookaholic. You go home. You devour the novel. Oh, my God. My God. At the end of the book, you cry. It's 4 a.m. You've been wrenched through the simply stated emotions of a man losing his child to a random act of malice. A man trying to find meaning in cruelty and chaos. A man trying to be alive and hopeful in a human morass, a man at war with God and modern philosophy, yet, a man who still enjoys Moghul chicken, playing tennis, getting blow jobs. By the end of the night you've seeped into the consciousness of Dr. Neil Downs, accompanying him from Brooklyn, through Dachau, to Delhi; from moral detachment, to tingling engagement; from sadness, to hindi-hipness, to hopeful atheism. You've met his erstwhile mentor, Levi Furstenblum, a survivor and deconstructor of the Holocaust, a man who wears his world weariness like a second skin, a compelling character who deposits cold, hard truths without even a flinch. And, yet, for all the death, for all the truth, the book isn't grim. It's all been written so lightly, so engagingly. A hopeful atheist yourself, you wonder out loud at the elegance of the writer's task. It's a triumph because this book isn't simple. It's just written as if it were.

LA WEEKLY Reviewed by Anthony Miller

Questions about language, what it can and cannot articulate and communicate, are at the core of And the Word Was. Downs tells us from the start that he is “no trickster,” but this admission comes to mean less about the way his tale un-folds than it does about the honest and unguarded emotions it embraces at every turn. Confidently and profoundly exploring the languages of grief, guilt, ravaged memory and lost faith, Bauman’s debut novel explores the psyche of a man whose personal diaspora and reconnection to the world quietly alter our perception of our own.
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BOOKLIST

Bauman's first novel is a magnificent debut, smart and intense, but accessible and riveting. Its central character, Neil Downs, is embraceable and human, a doctor for all the right reasons; and though he has led a good life, it is overturned by a random act of violence. His treasured young son, a brilliant and lovable pre-teen, is gunned down in a school shooting, and Downs finds later that day that his wife has betrayed him. When Downs' medical expertise cannot save his son and his spirituality cannot save his faith in his marriage, he turns to the universe in utter despair and moves to India, hoping to find either oblivion or hope. What he finds is a fascinating play of world politics encompassing a wide cast of characters. This story at first seems a strange foil for his internal turmoil, but as the two plots weave together, the connections become clearer. The binding thread of this narrative is the integration of suffering into one's worldview. Downs' favorite writer, Holocaust survivor Levi Furstenblum, denies all meaning in the universe, and his writings are interspersed within the book and espoused in real conversations between him and Downs, since Furstenblum is now living in India. In the end, the world does turn again, for all the characters, and the resolution is hopeful and fulfilling. This is simply a great novel, and hopefully only the first in what will be many more from the author.

LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE

Seekers in a Strange Land:
Novelists Joy Nicholson and Bruce Bauman find little refuge abroad
By Ariel Swartley

CURRENT EVENTS can be unwelcome in a novel—especially the horrific ones that we know too well from the 24-hour intensity of TV and the internet. However much they certify the story as being of this time and place, the splintering towers, the student in the trench coat with the rifle, the slack-jawed woman in the hospital bed are also distractions: Their outlines, fixed and implacable in our memories, distort fiction’s tenuous skin. Two new novels, though, by Los Angeles writers Joy Nicholson and Bruce Bauman, make a brilliant case for contemporaneity. Both books anchor themselves on recent events yet never assume that imagining history constitutes fiction. Rather, they do what only novels can: Make us gasp, sit up, say yes, the world has changed. This is what it feels like to live now.

[...]

DR. NEIL DOWNS, narrator of Bruce Bauman’s debut novel, And the Word Was (Other Press, 350 pages, $24), is another attractive contemporary pilgrim. His aim, though, is not to find but to lose himself.

“I did not choose India because I wanted to conquer the languages of Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi…no, I wanted to be deaf to the world around me. I did not choose Delhi because of my lustful desire to experiment with the innumerable sexual entanglements of the Kama Sutra; I almost never expected to have sex again after I left New York…. I chose Delhi because it was so foreign and faraway. Because I knew almost no one, and no one well at all. And no one knew me. But most of all, I chose Delhi because I no longer believed in god.”

Downs, an ER physician, has already lost his only child in a high school shooting and is estranged from his wife, who was unaccountably missing that day. The Judaism that once sustained him comfortably (along with the occasional chocolate Easter bunny, courtesy of his wife’s Protestant past) is no match for the senseless malice of his son’s killers and the knowledge of his wife’s betrayal. India offers him the chance to put his own suffering in perspective.

But Downs’s new post as embassy doctor, arranged by the American Ambassador whom he counts as an old friend, is not the goodwill gesture it first seems. The doctor he replaced is having an affair with the ambassador’s wife, and Downs is quickly drawn into the couple’s feud. Soon he begins to suspect that the tensions between the two aren’t merely domestic and that his job is more than medical. Each member of his new circle is engaged in an elaborate chess game: Holika, the young widow of a murdered activist; her rich, politically conservative uncle, who becomes Downs’s reluctant patient; and the ambassador, whose ties to each may not be what they seem. In this land of ancient cultures and recent democracy, where the personal is indistinguishable from the political, where an arranged marriage can be both expedient and loving. Downs learns to understand betrayal as a word of infinite nuance.

Bauman, an associate editor of the literary journal Black Clock, is not content to give us only diverse characters, vivid views of India, and a sometimes chilling plot. He sets Downs’s personal quest in a larger philosophical context in which Hinduism and Judaism both play a part. “There is something dirty about all those who survived the death camps,” Downs’s other new friend in Delhi asserts. Levi Furstenblum, author of a controversial satire praising Hitler, is a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz but lost his wife and child. Like Holika, who considers herself a “spy” in her own life, accepting the world she was born into even as she tries to change it, the aging Furstenblum responds to tragedy by moving away from theory – and belief in a divine order – toward simple practice: writing, some religious observance, friendship.

In another time Downs might, like Furstenblum, have been able to find a refuge far from home, but in the 21st century it is next to impossible to suffer in silence. Starting with the journalist who recognizes him at an embassy party, Downs’s notion that he is entitled to privacy is shredded at every step. Even the most personal act – a trip home to attend the unveiling of his son’s memorial – becomes a nightmarish hopscotch between borrowed apartments and lawyers’ offices. Like the shame inflicted on concentration camp victims and the demeaning control exerted over women in India, Downs’s experience threatens to turn him into a victim. His salvation, like that of Holika and Furstenblum, is to refuse such a one-dimensional definition.

Innocence is a convenient cloak but no protection. Probing beneath the stories he thinks he knows and recognizing his own power to cause damage, he also discovers he possesses certain inalienable rights: what to believe and the choice of when and how to fight back. That’s the way the world is now and how it’s always been.

BOLDTYPE

"Bauman has given Downs a refreshingly ruthless, unflinching, and humorous voice with which to chronicle his painful progress toward an uncertain future....Think Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, and Larry David engaged in a debate on the meaning of sacrifice and forgiveness."
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THE JEWISH JOURNAL OF LOS ANGELES

The sights and smells of India, and the customs of the cross-section of people Neil meets, are rendered so convincingly that you will come to think you’ve lived in India as well. Neil’s spiritual journey and how he finds his way back to his wife, his home, and to his own sense of self, makes “And the Word Was” as rewarding in parts as it is intellectually challenging in others.
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ENTERTAINMENT TODAY

And the Word Was (Other Press). In it, (the) notions of easily categorized complicity and culpability are challenged, as his doctor protagonist, who treated his dying son after a school shooting, withdraws from his marriage and the world as he knew it for New Delhi. The overwhelming power of the work is buttressed by a startlingly and sensorily vivid depiction of life in India.
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And the Word Was was an April Bookworm Library pick for Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm radio program.