Son of a rabbi, budding astronomer Gabriel Geismar is on his way from youth to manhood in the 1970s when he falls in love with the esteemed and beguiling Hundert family, different in every way from his own. Over the course of a decade-long drama unfolding in New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and the Wisconsin countryside, Gabriel enters more and more passionately and intimately into the world of his elective clan, discovering at the inmost center that he alone must bear the full wieght of their tragedies, past and present. Yet The Book of Getting Even is funny and robust, a novel rich in those fundamentals we go to great fiction for: the exploration of what is hidden, the sudden shocks, the feeling at last of life laid bare.

Praise

“Gabriel Geismar, the embattled protagonist of Taylor’s excellent second novel, is the son of a domineering rabbi growing up in nineteen-fifties New Orleans. Homosexual, suffering from a physical deformity (he has a supernumerary thumb), and enthralled by mathematics—“calculability, sweet detachment from the corporeal universe”—Gabriel has “a furious craving for other, nobler origins.” In college, he meets Marghie and Danny Hundert, whose famous physicist father is one of his heroes, and adopts the family as his own. The book explores the tortured and often misguided process by which children attempt to define themselves in relation to their parents (one iteration of the “getting even” of the title), a process from which Danny and Marghie, as Gabriel slowly discovers, are not exempt. Taylor captures their quests for identity in pitch-perfect dialogue and lengthy meditative passages; his elegant plotting feels at once deliberate and improvised.”
— The New Yorker

“In this delightful, character-driven coming-of-age novel, Gabriel Geismar grows up in mid-20th-century New Orleans as the only son of a rabbi, maturing into a brilliant, homosexual mathematician who is out of sync with his father's values. At Swarthmore in 1970, Gabriel meets the twins Daniel and Marghie Hundert, the children of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gregor Hundert, one of the so-called Hungarian Eight who emigrated to America and worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the bomb. Fascinated by the stately, Old World professor and his kindly wife, Lilo, and deeply attached to Marghie, a cinema-obsessed vegetarian, and to Daniel, an angry counterculture figure, Gabriel spends the summer with the family at their Wisconsin retreat, which yields cherished conversation and understanding. As Gabriel departs to study astrophysics at the University of Chicago, the tempo of Daniel's activism builds, and Marghie begins running a movie house. When the once great professor sinks into senile dementia, Lilo makes a necessary but terrible decision for them all. The editor of Saul Bellow's forthcoming letters, Taylor turns in a smart, humane look at what Gabriel calls the era's "intergenerational rancor.”
—Publisher's Weekly



“This elegiac novel features the long, tragic friendship of three young people coming of age in the 1970s. They meet as undergraduates at Swarthmore and begin their adult lives full of promise. By the end of the novel, that promise has given way to sadness, regret, and defeat, mainly because of bad choices. All three protagonists are skillfully rendered. Daniel and Marghie are twins, children of a Nobel prize-winning physicist, while Gabriel is the son of a rabbi from New Orleans . [ . . .] Much here is beautifully drawn: Gabriel's failed or unrealized romantic relationships prove especially poignant. These young people also lose their parents, and Taylor handles these passages with eloquence and pathos. This is a novel about friendship, loneliness, and the hazards adults encounter as they make their way in the world.”
— Library Journal

“In August 1970, Gabriel Geismar leaves home for college, not a moment too soon for this disaffected son of a New Orleans rabbi. A puckish twin brother and sister, Marghie and Danny Hundert, worldly seniors, take him under their wing. When he meets their parents, Hungarian émigrés exuding Old World gravitas and New World intellectual cachet (Gregor Hundert is a renowned physicist, onetime colleague of the godlike Oppenheimer at Los Alamos), Gabriel is convinced that this is the family he was intended for. As charmed by the attentive Southern boy as he is by them, the elder Hunderts enfold Gabriel, who becomes more their natural heir as the years go by than the children nature gave them.

Marghie loves Gabriel, but to no avail, since Gabriel loves Danny, while Danny, slipping into psychological meltdown, is devoted to the tragicomic destiny he has created for himself as a martyr to the cause of protesting the war in Vietnam. War and peace, the fracturing of generations, the sexual revolution and its casualties - with irony and pathos this beautifully written novel treats the defining themes of an era, filtered through the restless, eccentric intelligence of a striking cast of characters.”
— Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe

“Even as a teenager, mathematics prodigy Gabriel Geismar finds ways to cope with life; he distracts himself from what is base (such as seeking sex in a men’s bathhouse) by thinking of numbers, and he finds a new family after a hateful standoff with his rabbi father. As a 16-year-old freshman at Swarthmore in 1970, Gabriel is approached by fraternal twins Danny and Marghie Hundert; both fall in love with him, and he reciprocates these feelings physically with Danny. An unexpected bonus is the twins’ father, the renowned physicist Dr. Gregor Hundert, who, along with his wife, envelopes Gabriel in familial love, then guides his budding career. Tragedy ensues, as the Vietnam War causes Danny to follow his principles to extremes, while his father suffers dementia. Losses aside, Gabriel—with a doctorate and associate professorship in astrophysics—finds solace in his concept of the universe, from multiple galaxies to the smallest insect. A beautifully written and keenly intelligent novel, set in a context of cosmology, this is in turn humorous, almost unbearably moving, and comforting, as it points the way to Gabriel’s “perfect freedom.””
— Booklist [starred review]

“The book is a major achievement, a strong smart book that is defined by ethnic American identity — Jewish, yes, but also Hungarian and American; intellectual, literary, and scientific. This is a picture of a small, bounded world, which becomes more and more porous as the 1970s wear on, a group of people who bear the impact of the 20th century…Taylor draws with a free hand gorgeous, full descriptions of his characters…[and] he is equally skillful in capturing a moment.”
—Sarah Wildman, Ha'aretz, The International Herald Tribune
Read full review here

“Among the most original novels I have read in recent years. The story Taylor tells is a romance of brains — brains working well, then tragically giving out. The book is exuberant and charming and heartbroken by turns; indeed, the jaggedness of the ride is one of the things I like best, along with Taylor’s proceeding by ironies. Add to that a lyricism, an ear for dialogue, a strong feel for place, and a highly developed dramatic sense and you begin to have an idea of this novelist’s exceptional gift.”
— Philip Roth

“The Book of Getting Even is beautiful and beguiling. I especially admire Benjamin Taylor's ability to pack so much complex life into such an elegant package. It seems almost miraculous.”
— Peter Cameron

“Reading The Book of Getting Even is like first encountering Fanny and Zooey or Brideshead Revisited. I never expected to feel quite that way about a book again, and this one even disturbed my dreams two nights running, which doesn’t happen unless one is in a very heady realm indeed. What a tour de force, and what a pleasure. Benjamin Taylor is a literary magician.”
— Beth Gutcheon

"The Book of Getting Even has everything: Margaret Sullivan and Squeaky Fromme, Frank Borzage and John von Neumann and Henry Kissinger. It is immensely sane, witty, worldly, and entertaining, line by line (the best way to read any book.)"
— Phillip Lopate.

"What a wonderfully unusual and refreshing novel! From the very first page of The Book of Getting Even, you know you're in the hands of a virtuoso of words and an energetic storyteller. Benjamin Taylor's hero, an astronomer-to-be, and his chosen family are flung about mercilessly by history, and their surprising destinies are played out against nothing less than the physical universe itself -- from the farthest stars to the creepy things underfoot. This book is a splendid gift for the mind as well as the heart. "
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz

"An electric, arresting piece of writing, every bit on par with — and every bit as rich as — its brilliant title."
— Stacy Schiff

“The Book of Getting Even is a deeply satisfying novel, elegant and intellectually complex. I could read Benjamin Taylor forever.”
— Ann Patchett

"Finding one’s true home at the heart of another family is the theme of this eloquent, highly intelligent novel, a kind of love story not often seen, rendered in beautiful sentences flecked with humor and pain, the front-row report of a young man’s great good luck.”
— Amy Hempel

"Benjamin Taylor is a superb novelist. His book is marvelous in its originality, depth, sensitivity and power."
— Romulus Linney

"Benjamin Taylor's new novel, The Book of Getting Even, is literary fiction of the first water and a fitting successor to the evocative bildungsroman Tales Out of School. Here, Taylor looks with gimlet eye at family life -- the vexed relations of fathers and sons and sisters and brothers -- yet his vision is wide and deep; this is a book about literature and astrophysics, politics and persons, anxiety and belief, entomology and our place in the universe. Touching, tender, searing, exhilarating, it is written with unpretentious wisdom."
— Brenda Wineapple