Note: My review of Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations for Chicago Review of Books can be read here.
Fervor. By Toby Lloyd. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024. 288 pages. $28.00.
Here are the Rosenthals, starting with the children. Gideon is gay, Elsie is ecstatic (in the mystical sense), and Tovyah is tetchy. Their mostly devout parents, Eric and Hannah, feel that things have gone horribly wrong. Along with Elsie, who is now out of the mental institution but needs their supervision, they live in the Victorian house in North London where the children were raised. Gideon is off in Israel, having served its military, and Tovyah is reading history at Oxford. The disturbances started around ten years ago, after the death of Eric’s father Yosef, who in his words only “got out” of Treblinka, seeing as no one really “survived”. His dotage was spent in the attic, where he favored Elsie with his stories, and where ruthless Hannah interrogated a life story out of him that she turned into a bestseller called Gehinnom and Afterwards. At fourteen, bereaved and particularly upset that Yosef’s wishes for cremation were not honored, Elsie starts playing with a stone, runs some dangerous games among her friends, writes troubling stories for her English teacher (one of which seems informed by Kabbalah), and finally disappears.
Lloyd uses Yosef’s death and Elsie’s running away as a kind of prologue, though he will return to show more of Elsie’s miscreant journeying. He then assumes the first person narration of a new Oxford English student named Kate, a diligent, curious sort with a Jewish father, whose neighbor, the curt and very clever Tovyah Rosenthal, looks to her “exactly like a young Franz Kafka.” We heart part of the family saga through Tovyah through Kate, more from a third person narrator who can move from Tovyah’s shoulder, to Hannah’s, to Elsie’s, and there are also excerpts from Hannah’s Book of Yosef, controversial enough, and next up, an account of what she believes to be her daughter’s demonic possession called Daughters of Endor. Hannah’s Zionism is as bold as her supernatural convictions, so she is much pilloried at Oxford by students whom she considers antisemitic, but whom agnostic Kate would defend as strictly anti-Zionist. Tovyah is isolated by his association with his mother, and Kate, his only friend, drawn into his isolation. So, fictional non-fiction which some think fabulist has in any case real consequences for these fake people. Orthodox and atheistic literalism do battle while liberal seekers of metaphors and moral lessons trudge in the mushy middle. The author, meanwhile, thrilled by horror films like The Exorcist and Hereditary, sees it all as material which he can put to scary and mildly satirical ends. He arranges the Rosenthals like figurines in the dollhouse, sends them out, brings them back, bathes them in weird light, bruises and bloodies them. Fervor, Lloyd’s first novel, is a very promising beginning.
More on that point about opposing literalisms. Lloyd is quite thoroughgoing in laying out the differences between worldviews. To accompany the big question, whether Elise’s problem is mental or spiritual, he puts into play an enticing uncertainty about what is metaphor and what is not. Elsie writes a poem for Yosef—or as the family calls him, Zeide—using a tunnel as a symbol for death. Writerly Hannah turns literary critic on her own daughter and calls it cliché, Eric defends the “lovely metaphor”, and the girl confounds them both with a scene-ending response: “‘But it’s not a metaphor,’ Elsie said. ‘It’s a description. A metaphor is something that isn’t really happening.’” As her occult activities will demonstrate, Elise is not happy with rituals that claim only a metaphorical relationship with the spiritual. Kate starts going to a liberal synagogue where she overhears a Jewish student calling the enslavement in Egypt a metaphor, and she compares this to the Orthodox empty chair left for Elijah, there not as a metaphor but “because the prophet Elijah might just show up.” While patiently explaining such things, Lloyd does not develop Elsie’s distinction as much as he might; concerns like Israel and Palestine and ethical problems for writers intervene. We see it in brief, though, in an account of Yosef’s childhood in Warsaw, when Lloyd gives the historical overview and writes that no one expected the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the failure of appeasement, et. cetera, or finally that “the plans of countless families would have gone up in smoke.” It’s another three-tined fork: Lloyd may have unthinkingly let run a cliché that Hannah would deplore, he may have used the metaphor as a sort of mordant joke, or he may, like Elsie, and with the literal-minded Yosef’s approval, be describing something that was really happening.
Kate is not the liveliest of narrators, Lloyd having devised her mainly a spectator who has to seem normal compared to the Rosenthals. After some stilted early phrasings (“a few of us from the corridor required an afternoon movie to soften the residual pangs of our hangovers”), she settles into a familiar language of young adult wonder and sudden insight: “This, it seemed to me, was what it was all about”; “something clicked into place.” This is alright for Fervor’s needs, keeping the story moving and the attention on the modern mysteries. What distinguishes the novel from other horrible fictions is that while Kate has the usual university experiences after leaving home, she is not also creeping around an old house, or being stalked, or even suffering nightmares. She only sees one ghastly set piece, right near the end. Until then, much of the horror comes to her and us through tidbits at lunch in Oxford with Tovyah and Hannah, and through Daughters of Endor. Lloyd relishes Hannah’s exploitation of the drama and has her write things that his third person narrator, much less Kate, cannot. In Hannah’s first chapter, the orderly, upper middle class home is arranged with nearly bragging flourishes that Hannah uses to heighten the contrast with the horrors inside: “Each morning the façade catches the light of the rising sun, and often a man can be seen watering the roses and blinking in the day’s first brightness.” Hannah herself uses the creepy dollhouse analogy, and turns to solemn pronouncements on Elsie’s disappearance, as in “The girl who comes back will not be the same girl who vanished”.
While Fervor is not trying to be clever about horror, seeing its conventions as reliable, not ridiculous, and using them artfully and earnestly, it is working at a satire of uncertain scale, making light parody of Hannah’s tell-all bestseller, and earlier recreating a tabloid newspaper’s bullet-pointed account of Elsie’s disappearance, which includes Hannah testimonial (It’s every mother’s worst nightmare.”) Silly too is the public interest in these sordid matters, which at Kate’s Oxford is sometimes half dignified by supposed political convictions. Whether calling it “callous” of Mama Rosenthal to use her child’s life that way, or bad for the Jews, or just poor in style, everyone seems worked up by Daughters of Endor. The University Wiccan society is well enough attuned to the spirits of the times to complain that it’s “culturally insensitive”. Someone reviews it for the Oxford Student magazine and Lloyd gets the undergraduate’s nervous pomposity just right: “Oscar Wilde famously pronounced…” It seems only Kate’s interest in the Rosenthals, which feeds on her own more detached researches into Kabbalah, is not to be an object of satire, nor perhaps is the fascination of the author himself, if that can be brought into consideration. But then the nesting of stories and titling of parts is suggestive of a relationship between the book as a whole and its story different from the assumed one. This set of issues has not necessarily “clicked into place” by Fervor’s end, so the novel can probably be reread with an eye for such complications. And with simple pleasure too, it should be said.