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WORK TITLE: What to Do about the Solomons
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://bethanyball.com/
CITY:
STATE: NY
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NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2017002157
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Ball, Bethany
Found in: What to do about the Solomons, 2017: CIP t.p. (Bethany
Ball) data view ("Bethany Ball was born and raised in
Detroit and has lived in Santa Fe, New Jersey, Miami,
and Israel. She now lives in New York with her family")
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PERSONAL
Born in Detroit, MI.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
Contributor to websites, including Kveller.
SIDELIGHTS
Bethany Ball is a writer and novelist based in New York. She is married to an Israeli man, and on the website Kveller, she wrote about the cultural differences she discovered between herself and her husband, and her husband’s family and her own American relatives. Whereas her husband’s family tended to be active, noisy, and engaged with life, her own family was more mellow, quiet, and reserved. “We live in a town where nearly every couple we know is the product of two cultures, and sometimes, like us, two very different cultures,” she stated in the Kveller article, then concluded, “My husband is a first generation American, and I am something like 16th, and feels, somehow, like we have a very American marriage.”
Ball applies her knowledge about the Israeli lifestyle in her debut novel is What to Do About the Solomons, an “ambitious literary debut,” noted a Kirkus Reviews writer. Yakov Solomon, the family patriarch and leader in his kibbutz, has reached the end of his patience with his children. He has supported them financially all the way into adulthood, and it looks like he may have to rescue some of them yet again. Not that he is without resources; he is owner of a very successful construction business, though one that may have come about through misappropriation of kibbutz funds.
Unfortunately, the problems faced by the Solomon children won’t necessarily be resolved through the application of money. Son Ziv lives in Singapore with another man. Marc’s investment firm is under criminal investigation. Daughter Shira has abandoned her eleven-year-old son for Hollywood dreams after landing a minor part in a Harry Potter movie. Keren’s husband may be losing his mind, impulsively cobbling together sticks and debris and calling it art. And son Dror seems to envy his more successful siblings. With no answers and little direction, the Solomons struggle to terms with their individual and collective problems. Throughout the narrative, “Ball switches points of view for a mosaic of family members and associates in crisis and adrift,” observed a Publishers Weekly reviewer.
“Ball’s prose is compulsively readable, almost addictive, and she has a wicked sense of humor,” commented the Kirkus Reviews writer. “Leave it to the talented author to paint a picture rich in unique character descriptions and very observant of Israeli culture,” remarked Ellis Shuman, writing in the Times of Israel. Throughout the novel, “Ball switches points of view for a mosaic of family members and associates in crisis and adrift,” giving readers important glimpses into the lives and motivations of the characters, noted a Publishers Weekly writer.
Alana Newhouse, writing in the New York Times, concluded, “I ended What to Do About the Solomons absolutely swimming with affection, not just for the characters but for the multiple worlds that created them. Despite their collective penchant for psychodrama, there’s something profoundly lovely—and loving—about the Solomons. And about Bethany Ball’s debut.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of What to Do About the Solomons.
New York Times, April 10, 2017, Alana Newhouse, “A Debut Novel Follows a Financial Scandal to a Gossipy Kibbutz,” review of What to Do About the Solomons.
Publishers Weekly, February 6, 2017, review of What to Do About the Solomons, p. 40.
ONLINE
Bethany Ball Website, https://www.bethanyball.com (October 31, 2017).
Literary Review, http://www.theliteraryreview.org (October 31, 2017), review of What to Do About the Solomons.
Times of Israel Blog, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ (April 25, 2017), Ellis SHuman, review of What to Do About the Solomons.
Bethany Ball was born in Detroit and has lived in Santa Fe, New Jersey, Miami, and Israel. She now lives in New York with her family. Her current book, What to Do About the Solomons (Grove Atlantic), has been released April 4, 2017.
A Midwestern WASP & a Kibbutz-Bred Israeli Walk Into a Marriage
By Bethany Ball Mar 9, 2017
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feet of bride and groom, wedding shoes (soft focus). Cross processed image for vintage lookfeet of bride and groom, wedding shoes (soft focus). Cross processed image for vintage look
The first time I realized my husband and I were from different planets was when he tried to bargain at J. Crew. We were newly dating and trying to figure one another out. My husband skulked around J Crew while I gathered clothing in his size. We piled all the clothing high on the checkout counter and my husband pulled out a wad of cash. “So,” he said, to the woman ringing him up. “Can I get some kind of a discount? You can’t do better?” In that moment, I felt my face go red and I wanted to bury myself. I knew in that moment that I had never met anyone like him.
My husband was fascinated the first time we went to my parents’ favorite bar/restaurant in rural Michigan, and my father pulled out his checkbook to pay for our fifteen-dollar meal. He was shocked to find that my father had never bargained for anything ever, probably in his life.
My father is so noise averse he once got annoyed at me for scratching a mosquito bite too loudly. My father-in-law is so loud every time he coughs, it’s like an explosion: HaRUMPH! HaRUMPH, HaRUMPH! In his house, he wakes up at 6 a.m. and turns the news on in his bedroom full volume, and also in the living room. He then walks back and forth down the hallway between the rooms shaving his face with a loud ancient electric razor. Every once in a while he gives a loud HaRUMPH! just, I think, to make sure we know he’s there.
The first time I brought my husband home to meet my parents, we walked into the house to find both my parents sitting side by side on the couch reading. The only sound in the house was my father’s clock collections ticking. My dad raised his hand in a kind of wave: “Hey,” he said.
When we would visit my parents, before my mother died, my husband was surprised that we didn’t call them to give a time of our arrival. “They’ll know we’ve arrived when we get there,” I told him. “What’s the big deal?” We are masters of the “Irish goodbye.” Before my mother died, she’d slip away when it was time to leave. I’d look out the window and seeing her sitting in the car, waiting to take off.
Not so with my in-laws. Visiting Israel, my husband calls his parents even before the plane has pulled up to the gate. We call them waiting for the luggage and call back after we’ve loaded the luggage into the rental car. We call when we get on the road. We call when we stop to get an espresso. We call to report on the traffic, the weather, the latest news and gossip. All during the three-hour drive north to the kibbutz. And when we arrive, my husband and our kids are engulfed in hugs and filled with food that my mother-in-law has prepared, just for us. She will even prepare cholent, the big winter stew that cooks for 12 hours, in the middle of August, because she knows how much I love it.
At a family gathering some years ago, I watched in amazement as my mother-in-law made a beeline for the food tables. She grabbed four plates, piled them with food, set them on a table and waved us over. “Come,” she said. “Come quickly and eat.” I did as I was told, and was surprised to find, when I walked over to the food table 10 minutes later, that all the food—every scrap of food—was gone. The table was completely decimated.
I learned that for many years on the kibbutz, food had been quite scarce. But where I’d grown up, in a place of relative privilege where portions were enormous, leaving food on one’s plate was actually rational.
My husband tans and I burn. He craves the company of a few close friends, village life, three solid meals, comfort, sameness. I crave time alone, but also excitement, big cities, new people and experiences. He watches basketball, football, soccer and tennis in the TV room, while I hunker down in the bedroom with books, magazines, and my laptop.
And yet. We love good food, good restaurants and traveling. In fact, I’d wanted to marry someone from overseas so that travel in my life was guaranteed. We are passionate about tennis and play all year, and often together. We like to go to parties and gatherings together and take apart all interactions in the car ride home. We are big fans of Judd Apatow movies and “Game of Thrones” and my husband will happily watch any romantic comedy I suggest. We like to cook. We love our dogs and cats and most importantly, our kids. Though he grew up outside his parents’ house in a kibbutz, and I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, we are on the same page in almost every way about their education and upbringing. This is not to be taken for granted.
We live in a town where nearly every couple we know is the product of two cultures, and sometimes, like us, two very different cultures. The children seem possibly more open minded, seeing that there is no right way to do things. Our children and the children of our friends find their way in this soup of various backgrounds, perhaps a little confused, or perhaps a little freer from the usual restraints of fixed identity.
My husband is a first generation American, and I am something like 16th, and feels, somehow, like we have a very American marriage.
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What to Do About the Solomons
264.6 (Feb. 6, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
What to Do About the Solomons
Bethany Ball. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (256p)
ISBN 978-0-8021-2457-9
Respected leader at his kibbutz, founder of a thriving construction business, 75-year-old patriarch Yakov Solomon is fed up with his children in Ball's debut novel about a prosperous, beleaguered Israeli family. Yakov no longer speaks to eldest son Ziv, who lives in Singapore with another man; middle son Dror suffers from severe sibling envy; rich and successful Marc's California investment firm faces criminal investigation; daughter Keren's husband, Guy, cannot control his artistic impulses; and daughter Shira, whose acting career peaked with a bit part in a Harry Potter movie, leaves her 11-year-old son, Joseph, home alone while she visits Hollywood. Money can't solve their problems, and medication--prescribed or illegal--only makes them worse. Marc returns to the kibbutz, his wife stoned, his childhood sweetheart suicidal, his future uncertain, while Joseph assists his half-brother's attempt to run away from army service. Clearly, the Solomons have come a long way from the ideals of the kibbutz in early years. Ball switches points of view for a mosaic of family members and associates in crisis and adrift. Her terse, sharp-edged prose captures settings ranging from an American jail where highest bail is king to a French military post where they haven't won a war since Napoleon, but they sure know how to live. For all its humor, penetrating disillusionment underlies Ball's memorable portrait of a family, once driven by pioneer spirit, now plagued by overextension and loss of direction, unsure what to do with its legacy, teetering between resentment, remorse, and resilience. Agent: Duvall Osteen, the Aragi Agency. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"What to Do About the Solomons." Publishers Weekly, 6 Feb. 2017, p. 40+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480593811&it=r&asid=1f82c0298b48fca7062cf8438103b958. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480593811
Ball, Bethany: WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS
(Feb. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Ball, Bethany WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS Atlantic Monthly (Adult Fiction) $25.00 4, 4 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2457-9
An ambitious literary debut about an Israeli family and its oddball members.When Guy Gever starts taking branches and sticks, arranging them in bizarre configurations around his home or in the midst of a field, and calling the result "art," his wife's family, the Solomons, is concerned. Yakov Solomon, the family patriarch, is especially concerned. Yakov has financially supported each of his children well into adulthood, and it looks like his duties still aren't over. "When my children want money, they come to me," he says. "I've paid for six weddings, five divorces, the funeral of one daughter-in-law's father, and countless birthday celebrations. Now I must pay for Guy Gever's madness?" Ball's debut novel examines the lives of each of the Solomons--Guy Gever and Yakov, yes, but also Marc Solomon, Yakov's youngest son, who moves to LA from their cloistered kibbutz, marries, has children, and is then accused of money laundering; and Marc's sister, Shira, an aging actress who takes off for LA while her young son stays home alone; and there is Dror, another brother, and Vivienne, their mother, and also Maya, Marc's childhood girlfriend. In short, there are a lot of characters--perhaps too many--and each chapter picks up a new point of view. Those chapters jump around in time, too, so the complexities of certain relationships aren't made clear until the end. Ball's prose is compulsively readable, almost addictive, and she has a wicked sense of humor. But the novel doesn't quite add up: by the time you've met all the characters, the book is already ending, and nothing seems to have been resolved. Humor can't quite save this appealing novel that ends before it's fully begun.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ball, Bethany: WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234679&it=r&asid=7c1f6218d3b6eaeffdb301b95315f91f. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234679
A Debut Novel Follows a Financial Scandal to a Gossipy Kibbutz
By ALANA NEWHOUSEAPRIL 10, 2017
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WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS
By Bethany Ball
245 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $25.
In her first novel, “What to Do About the Solomons,” Bethany Ball seems intent on asserting an inverse of Tolstoy’s famous adage: All unhappy Jewish families may in fact be alike, but each happy Jewish family is happy in its own way.
On its face, this book is a wry, dark multigenerational tale about the Israeli and American branches of an extended family. Like any Jewish story worth the salt that Lot’s wife became, it’s admirably and quite beautifully rooted in 20th-century history — and yet, at the same time, it largely steers clear of the politics that, from one angle or another, drag down so many contemporary novels. Ranging from the early 1900s to today, from the well-manicured neighborhoods of greater Los Angeles to prostitutes’ hotel rooms in New York to the confines of a gossip-soaked kibbutz, Ball’s narrative sidesteps the Middle East’s many crises, focusing instead on the roiling clashes inside the domestic world of a set of intertwined individuals.
Centered on a financial scandal in California that threatens to take down Marc Solomon, one of the clan’s central figures, Ball’s story swivels its spotlight from one twisted character and association to another. She works hard to render each with sensitivity and respect, a dedication that also makes her fabulously unafraid to mark her characters with signs of psychosis and brutality, as well as the kind of contemptuous wit that can distinguish a long-term relationship: “These days, Carolyn looks at Marc and thinks: I hate him less. I hate him less and less each day.”
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The humor here is finely wrought and often provides satisfying relief from the characters’ struggles, but it is not in fact one of the book’s overriding features. Rather, emotional insight is clearly the currency that matters most to Ball. “Marc has a theory,” she observes toward the novel’s end, “that no one loves anyone after a certain age. We are, none of us, really capable of it. Right about the time you stop enjoying discovering new music, that’s the moment you are incapable of love. Everything beyond that moment is as mechanical as a windup toy. It is all memory and ghosts.”
Unfortunately, not everything in “What to Do About the Solomons” works equally well. Some plot threads are too short, others too long. When a character dies in just the way a loved one paranoiacally feared he might, the reader feels not the chilling hand of fate but the heavier one of an author indulging in overwriting.
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Like many writers of humorous, dark Jewish stories, Ball will inevitably be compared to the master, Isaac Bashevis Singer.
And, as is always the case, this will be profoundly unfair, like comparing the builder of a terrific skyscraper to the God who created the earth it stands on. But it’s also worth noting that Singer was a consummate insider, rendering what was for many an internally coherent world, that of Polish Jewry. In many ways, there is no such “inside” to the relationship of American Jews and Israel, which makes Ball’s ability to probe her characters’ relationships, their histories and sense of themselves even more impressive than one might at first realize.
And there’s something else. I ended “What to Do About the Solomons” absolutely swimming with affection, not just for the characters but for the multiple worlds that created them. Despite their collective penchant for psychodrama, there’s something profoundly lovely — and loving — about the Solomons. And about Bethany Ball’s debut.
Alana Newhouse is the editor in chiefof Tablet magazine.
A version of this review appears in print on April 16, 2017, on Page BR19 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Love and Laundering
A Review of What To Do About the Solomons by Bethany Ball
Rachel Sona Reed
(New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017)
It may be best to begin by noting that I am not the audience for this debut novel, a collection of stories inspired by author Bethany Ball’s experiences living with her husband’s extended family in an Israeli commune, or kibbutz. My only (in)direct contact with Israeli concerns was a brief encounter with a 20-something American Zionist in a Munich hostel bar, where the young man confided, over green-tinged pints of pilsner, his understandable fear regarding his upcoming (voluntary) military service. It was St. Patrick’s Day. There were many tourists from the UK in transitory residence. I wonder if the young man came to the same conclusion as one of this book’s secondary American characters and attempted to walk back his allegiance.
Communal, rather than national or religious, allegiance is at the core of What to Do About the Solomons. “The kibbutz was a raw factory of human survival.” This observation is offered toward the middle of the book, when we have already become acquainted with much of its cast of characters and their disparate yet interconnected problems. This line comes as we learn about patriarch Yakov’s early years in Israel as “the new Jews,” who “had come to Palestine after the pogrom at the turn of the last century with their communist ideas and little else.” By the time he has come into his own, Yakov will have shed these for the more lucrative ideology of capitalism and amassed a fortune by leveraging the formerly communal funds of the kibbutz to start a construction business. Tangentially, we are to understand that Yakov profits from the Israeli settlements. Yet he attempts to broker peace with the local sheikh, eager to smooth the path to profit. “Only through commerce can we wage peace,” he claims.
Guided by detached, matter-of-fact prose, we follow members of Yakov’s family forward and backwards through time, and in and out of countries from Algeria to America, as they attempt to make sense of themselves, one another, and their relationships to Israel. Commentary on the third rail of Israel’s politics and practices is largely confined to Yakov’s ambivalence about his role in the proliferation of settlements and critiques of the country’s conscripted military service’s lasting ill-effects on various characters. Some are called to serve, others do so out of familial obligation, and others were never meant to suffer through the brutal training. All are relieved that they did not serve in a time of war.
For obvious reasons, this book will be especially appealing to readers with ties to or interest in Israel. But its reach extends farther, as this is more a collection of connected character studies than a novel with a distinct political orientation. Through her characters, all of whom are hardened yet vulnerable, Ball presents various perspectives on the ongoing conflict that provide an otherwise unexamined backdrop to their intimate daily lives.
The incessant infidelity running through the book can trace its thematic roots to the kibbutz, where “marriage was an outdated concept.” Though these physical dalliances are quotidian, characters struggle to connect emotionally – with each other, with themselves. No one seems to enjoy a truly satisfying sexual encounter. The patriarch of the family (Yakov) is the only one who seems to live fully throughout his life, as he embraces the community influence his fortune has afforded him. The rest of the characters must make do with the snatches of contentment they’re afforded, or else create for themselves amid otherwise materially trying and emotionally damaged lives.
Ball guards the identities of some characters like state secrets, allowing the identity of one chapter’s narrator to remain ambiguous until the mid-point, thereby providing several perspectives on the characters therein. Unafraid to expose her characters’ flaws, Ball manages to build empathy for each of them. Her perfunctory style beautifully underlines the familial tensions among her characters. Readers can feel their emotional detachment. And unlike in other books where quotation-free dialogue is the stylistic affectation, Ball deploys this with exceptional skill. I rarely questioned who was speaking, or – more to the point – if anyone was speaking in the first place. This further serves to manifest the fluidity of the novel’s subject matter. It is harmonious cacophony.
Plot is doled out in unequal pieces by various characters, and there’s no discernible pattern to knit them neatly together. Rather, readers are presented with the interconnected lives of nearly a dozen characters in all their messy glory. Reality may not bite, but it often leaves you sweaty and in the bed of an unsavory character, or left to fend for yourself as a teenage boy whose driving impulses are insatiable hunger and a justified fear in going out at night in search of dinner. The plot’s fragmented nonlinearity heightens the futility of any attempt to pin down these characters’ motives or futures. They simply are. There to be accepted, or not, with no intention to apologize to one another or a reader who seeks something akin to closure. We’re allotted select slices of each character’s complicated life, and are allowed to draw our own conclusions or let the ambiguity remain.
It is the novel’s spare language and narrative neutrality that brings these characters and the situations in which they find themselves into stark relief. Though explicit and reflective, their feelings remain raw and often unexamined. Closure is a luxury most cannot access, much less afford. Lives are lived out in close proximity, yet unbridgeable emotional distance keeps them from truly knowing one another. Nearly every character we meet is discontent in their own way, and many can trace this to the kibbutz. No one is particularly sympathetic, which might be the point. Even ostensibly innocent characters (such as the children) are allowed their human failings.
As the endless web of revelations slowly unspools, threads begin to link characters to one another in ways both surprising and predictable. The few characters who emerge ahead of the game by the end of the narrative are the ones with whom we are least intimately acquainted. Tragedy plagues the lives of everyone else; the lingering effects are at once ephemeral and carve deep scars in their victims. One revelation in particular is telegraphed early on, and by the time the connection is made explicit, it’s almost too late. Perhaps the tardy addition of information is intentional – Ball may be questioning the power of such a revelation to change anything meaningful for her characters.
Preparing readers for the mosaic to come, the novel opens with a scene as surreal as it is grounded. We’re confronted with an artist who uses found objects as his medium and may be going crazy, yet he manages to thwart the suicide of a character whose significance to the Solomons will be revealed later. A few years and thousands of miles away, we meet a housewife who drowns her shock with prescriptions after her husband is accused of money laundering. The consequences are as vague as her ability to cope with daily life. As the time warps continue, we follow characters in and out of childhood and young adulthood and into old age, gaining access to their inner lives through brief scenes, juxtaposed to suggest shared histories. Thematic and genetic threads also connect the vignettes, and the overall effect is one of disquiet. Never mind what to do about the Solomons; what did their stories just do to the reader?
Review of ‘What to Do About the Solomons’ by Bethany Ball
April 25, 2017, 1:45 pm
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The first thing you’ll notice when opening the pages of What to Do About the Solomons by Bethany Ball (Atlantic Monthly Press, April 2017) is the Solomon family tree. You may end up referring to this tree frequently as one character after another is introduced. After all, this is a multi-generational family drama starring Yakov Solomon, his children and his grandchildren. It’s a bit confusing at first, until you get to know them all.
Yakov – “a real sabra, born in Israel seventy-five years ago. He’d gone to school with Rabin, supped with Barak, was the guest of the kings of Jordan and Morocco” – is the founding member of a Jordan Valley kibbutz who has built a very successful construction company. Yakov is married to the “beautiful and worldly” Algerian-born Vivienne. Heartbroken when her non-Jewish boyfriend fails to follow her to Palestine, she brazenly states, “I will never love you, Yakov Solomon!”
Yet the couple raise five children and the novel follows this second generation and their offspring. There is Marc, the Israeli naval commando who moved to Los Angeles only to find his asset management firm accused of a vast money laundering scheme. Marc’s sister Shira is a self-absorbed movie actress whose career is more important than caring for Joseph, the 11-year-old son she leaves to fend for himself in Jerusalem while she travels with her actor friend Ayelet.
Guy Gever, married to the family’s youngest daughter Keren, is the strangest of the lot. He chases away migrating birds that eat the kibbutz’s crops and his nighttime escapades include hunting porcupines. The hungry birds, coming back for more despite Guy’s efforts, play a symbolic role in how the Solomon children relate to their father.
What to Do About the Solomons
What to do about the Solomons
Vivienne says to her husband, “Yakov, you were the one who said, ‘Keep the seeds in your pocket and give it to the birds one by one.’” To which Yakov responds, “Keep the birds close so they don’t fly away.” Yakov doesn’t entirely feel affection for his offspring. “I’m done with Guy Gever and all the rest of them! I should have cut them off years ago… Offer them a finger and they want the whole hand!”
The children return home to see Yakov one last time and to claim their share of what he built. The kibbutz is the stage for their interaction; its founding is portrayed with rose-tinted nostalgia. “The kibbutzniks were the new Jews … they belonged to no God, but only the collective and the land that was historically theirs.” For Yakov, “The kibbutz was a raw factory of human survival.”
What to do about these Solomons, who return to their roots even as they continue to grow apart? Leave it to the talented author to paint a picture rich in unique character descriptions and very observant of Israeli culture. We are drawn into the Solomons’ lives, into their loves and losses, into their ups and downs. For the Solomons it is “Yom asal, yom basal” – “One day honey, the next day onions.” For us as readers, the Solomons’ story is pure enjoyment.