Starred review from February 1, 2010
At the start of this outstanding novel of psychological suspense, Kellerman's fourth (after The Genius
), 30-year-old philosophy grad student Joseph Geist finds himself at loose ends after being suspended from Harvard (for failing to do any work) and breaking up with his longtime girlfriend. When Geist answers an ad in the Harvard Crimson
seeking a serious “conversationalist,” he ends up being paid to debate free will for a few hours a day with Alma Spielmann, an elderly woman of Viennese origin. After the two bond, Spielmann offers Geist free room and board at her Cambridge house, where she lives alone. The sudden appearance of Spielmann's difficult nephew, who relies on Spielmann's financial support, threatens Geist's comfortable relationship with his benefactor. The plot builds to a climax that's as devastating as it is plausible. Few thriller writers today are as gifted as Kellerman at using lucid and evocative prose in the service of an intense and nail-biting story.
February 15, 2010
So here's the setup: Joseph, a Harvard philosophy graduate student, has just been kicked out by his girlfriend and needs a job and a place to live. He responds to an ad for a "conversationalist" and is hired by enigmatic octogenarian Alma, who was a philosophy student herself decades earlier in Austria. Then Joseph moves in. It's a charmed life, briefly, until Alma dies and he reaches a moral crossroads. There's her drug-addled nephew to contend with, and a couple of curious police officers wondering about the circumstances of Alma's death. Violence ensues, and from then on, it's pure torture for Joseph and the reader, really. VERDICT The buildup is excruciatingly slowthink bad Dostoyevskyand the protagonist so unsympathetic that it's difficult to care about his quandaries. Kellerman incorporates clever and classic elements, but his fourth novel (after "The Genius") would have sufficed as a taut short story of psychological suspense. This is only for those intrigued by philosophical questions and moral debates. Anticipate some demand from the literary thriller set but hope for a more energetic pace with his next title. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 12/09.]Teresa L. Jacobsen, Solano Cty. Lib, Fairfield, CA
Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 1, 2010
Joseph Geist sees himself as a man of grand ideas. He clothes are tattered. He owns only a few books and a half bust of Nietzsche. But after eight years of study and professing, hes bounced from Harvards Ph.D. program in philosophy, and a disagreement with his lover gets him bounced from her apartment. Broke and virtually homeless, he answers an ad in the Crimson for a Conversationalist. Six weeks after beginning his duties, Joseph is invited to move into the grand Victorian home of Alma, his brilliant, witty, and cultured employer-interlocutor. Joseph develops a deep respect and affection for the septuagenarian and, after much philosophical rumination, concludes that hes never been happier. But his idyll soon becomes a nightmare. Kellermans novel is certainly character-driven, and Geist, the ascetic, intellectual student of free will, drives ituntil it drives him. The philosopher is seduced by ease and soon succumbs to other less-than-noble emotions: covetousness, jealousy, panic, and hysteria. Theres a subtle but gnawing inevitability to this very closely observed, engaging portrait of an eternal sophomore.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)