A Novel by Robert Cohen
Harper & Row, 1988
Harper Perennial, 1989
(From the Jacket Copy)
Robert Cohen begins his career with a very ambitious and impressive novel. The Organ Builder is the story of a dour young lawyer, Hesh Freeman, who gives up his place in the world in order to contend with the space in himself that isolates him from others.
This giving up takes the form of a quest, actually two quests. The first involves a reluctant journey to the Southwest. to a nursing home outside Santa Fe where his alcoholic mother, now terminally ill, resides; then to Los Alamos where his father was employed as a nuclear physicist before he disappeared twenty years ago. The second quest is contained in the narrative Hesh writes of his journey, notably his effort to end his isolation by allowing his imagination to inhabit other lives. In time, voices come to him, principally those of his parents, telling of how the experience of developing the Atom bomb shattered their marriage.
When we first meet him, Hesh Freeman seemingly is the last person to get involved in such matters. He closed the book on his parents long ago, even changed his name from Friedmann, to take up his own life by his own lights. Except that neither has worked out too well. He has a broken marriage, a tenuous relationship with his young son, and a future as a lawyer that he suspects is downwardly mobile, despite the patronage of a senior partner in his firm, the omnivorous Charlie Goldwyn, a role model for precisely what Hesh fears he secretly wants to become. Then into his life walks a brash young filmmaker who wants to make a documentary of the career and mysterious disappearance of Eli Friedmann. Arthur Gordon is almost as repellent to Hesh as is his project. Except that Arthur has a very wife who is at much the same loose ends that Hesh is. Then Charlie Goldwyn insists that Hesh try a suit with him against some Indians in New Mexico who don't want to sell their uranium-rich land. And so, dragging his feet most of the way, Hesh embarks on this journey to the black hole at the center of his past -- and, to a crucial extent, of our society.
Readers of The Organ Builder will find much the same combination of social vision and shrewd obsession, of narrative punch and vigorous style, that marked the debuts of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Like them, Robert Cohen writes close to the bone of both individual and generational experience, clarifying both the things seen and the forces that are unseen, and so remains that much more in control.
"Robert Cohen is a man who makes scenes. Indeed, he seems to possess a genius for the directed, withering menace in essentially decent people. The Organ Builder is a novel of witty, scary intelligence."
--Stanley Elkin
'Witty and intelligent, The Organ Builder makes the most of a subject that is worth reading about. Robert Cohen is very good. We will be hearing a lot from hiirn. "
--Leonard Michaels
'The Organ Builder is a smart book, one which gets, in a very direct way, at the dread of choice, as well as its necessity, in an age of entropy, uncertainty, and very large bombs. It also manages to be funny, lyrical, and brimming with characters at once memorable, colorful, and utterly believable."
--Kem Nunn
"The Organ Builder is arresting and absorbing, because Robert Cohen delivers reality in a fresh way. The book is thoughtful, complex, and original--very much alive.It makes itself matter."
--Richard P. Brickner
"Reading a fine first novel is like falling in love:It's a rare and dizzying experience, conferring, seemingly out of nowhere, an unexpected beneficence. That's precisely the way I felt after reading The Organ Builder."
-- Dan Cryer, Newsday
"Cohen may be the first writer of his generation oto work confidently in ... the capacious, literate, and high-comical vein opened 35 years ago by Saul Bellow in The adventures of Augie March."
-- Sam Tanenhaus, Chicago Tribune
"First novels are not supposed to be this good. Robert Cohen, an uncommonly gifted stylist, makes his remarkable debut as a novelist by interweaving two story lines [that express] the fundamental truth of life in the nuclear age."
-- Charles Masinton, Kansas City Star
"Robert Cohen's first novel is an intimate, stunningly written portrait of a man and his reluctant confrontation with the past...all narrated in a voice that...often approaches sheer poetry."
-- New York Times Book Review
Jacket illustration (c) 1988 Bascove
Jacket design (c) 1988 Gloria Adelson/Lulu Graphics
Author's photograph (c) 1988 Jerry Bauer
Harper & Row, Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022