A Novel by Robert Cohen
Scribner's, 1996
Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1997
(From the Jacket Copy)
The Here and Now is the story of a chance encounter and the tumult that ensues when opposites (or apparent ones) turn into strange attractors. Samuel Kamish, a no-longer-quite-so-young editor at a Manhattan newsmagazine, has watched his career run aground, his marriage disintegrate, and his worldview shrink almost to the vanishing point. On the flight to his best friend Warren Pinsky's third wedding, he finds himself thrust into an awkward friendship with a young Hasidic couple from Brooklyn, a friendship that leads him on a strange and provocative odyssey and sends him reeling in the direction of what may be his truest self.
As we are drawn in to the lives of this unlikely threesome, we see the moral confusions and crossed purposes that threaten believers and nonbelievers alike with estrangement from others and themselves. Here is an exuberant, penetrating novel about faith and fickleness by a writer whose first novel The New York Times Book Review called "stunningly written." And according to the Chicago Tribune, Cohen "may be the first of his generation to work confidently in the capacious, literate, and highly comical vein opened by Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March."
ROBERT COHEN is the author of The Organ Builder. His short fiction has been published in GO, Harper's, Iowa Review, The Paris Review, Antaeus, as well as anthologized in the Pushcart-Prize and Editors' Choice: New American Stories. The winner of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award, he has taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, the University of Houston, and Harvard. Born in 1957, he currently teaches at Middlebury College, and lives nearby with his wife and sons.
"In the tradition of Kafka and Bellow, Robert cohen conjures the waiting man, half-Jewish, half-hearted, half-certain, and accomplishes the impossible: makes him move. The Here and Now is a great comic storm, beautifully written, full of brilliant flashes."
-- Mona Simpson
"The Here and Now is a philosophical comedy, a fierce and touching assessment of the chances a weary rationalist have of giving himself over to anything he can't understand, outwit, outtalk, outcontrol. Robert Cohen speaks, with an almost painful accuracy, to everyone who doubts but doesn't want to. The Here and Now is daring, unsetlling, wise in the distinictions it makes between kinds of desire, and -- to make a question of it in the spirit of the book -- how is it still possible to be so funny?"
-- Rosellen Brown
" makes the heart beat faster, he makes you roar with laughter, he
makes you feel the hot breath of the real thing, good writing, on your neck."
--Anne Roiphe, The Jerusalem Report
"Cohen reveals the perilous depths hidden beneath ordinary life, the sudden yearnings that move us... and he accomplishes this with brilliance, precision, and humor."
-- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review