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Cohen’s bookish learning and worldly knowhow are on show in this fantasia about the Israeli prime minister’s father, inspired by an anecdote from Harold Bloom
The first obligation, when turning to the work of the electrifying American writer Joshua Cohen, is to stress that he clearly is a genius. In his essays (Attention!) and stories (Four New Messages), and in novels such as Witz, Book of Numbers, Moving Kings and now The Netanyahus – a comic historical fantasia – a dizzying range of bookish learning and worldly knowhow is given rich, resourceful expression. Cohen, who turned 40 last September, has prompted all the desirable M-words (master, magus, major) as well as comparisons to Thomas Pynchon (justified) and David Foster Wallace (slightly lazy). While James Wood settles for calling him one of the most prodigious stylists at work in the US today, Nicole Krauss has flatly declared that nobody writing in English is more gifted.
Cohen’s new novel, a sidelong portrait of the Israeli prime minister’s father, has its origins in admiration spurred by his earlier work. In May 2018, he received an email from Harold Bloom, the celebrated critic and longtime Yale professor, summoning him to Connecticut. The resulting encounter was transcribed in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Bloom later included Book of Numbers in his posthumously published account of 48 novels “to read and re-read”. The Netanyahus is dedicated to Bloom’s memory, and fills out a story that the critic told Cohen about playing chaperone to Benzion Netanyahu, a Polish-born, Israel-based academic better known as Benjamin’s father, during a visit to Cornell. Fills out, and wildly fictionalises: Harold Bloom, defender of the western canon, becomes Ruben Blum, a specialist in American economic history at Corbin college in New York state. He is chosen, as the only Jewish faculty member, to host an obscure historian of late-medieval Spain – Netanyahu’s real speciality – who is coming for an interview. Continue reading...