- This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001 and has received wide acclaim. And no wonder - it is so damn good. It's sharply satirical and stereotypically Jewish in content and style.
- A young Jewish boy, Ruben Blum, grows up in America and becomes a scholar of history. We're subject to rich and detailed debates, and Judaism's struggle to survive under antagonistic Christian empires.
- The small college where Blum lectures invites a controversial historian, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, to give a lecture to the students and an after dinner speech to a wider audience as part of his application for a permanent professorial position.
- His lecture on the age old contest between history and myth, or between Judaism and Christianity, is stunningly good and warmly embraced, but his less formal speech at the college, after a few drinks, illustrates his fanatical nationalist Zionism, and most attendees find it offensive. Cohen presents us with both lecture and speech in full detail. He treats the reader as highly intelligent.
- Professor Netanyahu has three young sons. In the Credits and Extra Credits final chapter we learn that the middle boy, Benjamin, later in life becomes the politician and Prime Minister of Israel. Here's what Cohen has to say about him:
His reign, marked by the building of walls, the construction of settlements, and the normalisation of occupation and state violence against the Palestinians, represents the ultimate triumph of the formerly disgraced Revisionist vision promulgated by his father.
- We also learn that the giant American literary critic Harold Bloom was actually the Blum character in the novel who coordinated the campus visit of Ben-Zion Netanyahu and his family.
- Here are some of the many favourable reviews of this book:
'The Netanyahus is constructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant. Some scenes are funny beyond belief. But even when moments in the book are sharp or melancholy, they keep an undertone of witty and ironic observation. The vision in this book is deeply original, making clear what a superb writer Joshua Cohen is.' - Colm Toibin
'Joshua Cohen is such an accomplished writer it's surprising he isn't a better known one.... Cohen's new book - his sixth - continues the turn to allegorical realism [and] is among his best: a fastidious and very funny book that is one of the most purely pleasurable works of fiction I've read in ages.' - Jon Day, Financial Times
'The Netanyahus is Cohen's sixth novel, his most conventional and his best to date. It is a tour de force: compact, laugh-out-loud funny, the best new novel I've read this year [and] probably the funniest novel ever written about contending historiographies.... Cohen's lesson, in this determinedly comic novel, is that history happens as farce and tragedy simultaneously.' - John Phipps, The Times
'[Cohen] clearly is a genius ... The Netanyahus [is] a comic historical fantasia - a dizzying range of bookish learning and worldly knowhow is given rich, resourceful expression.... With its tight time frame, loopy narrator, portrait of Jewish-American life against a semi-rural backdrop, and moments of cruel academic satire, The Netanyahus reads like an attempt, as delightful as it sounds, to cross-breed Roth's The Ghost Writer and Nabokov's Pale Fire.... This is a brisk, impudent, utterly immersive novel.' - Leo Robson, Guardian
'The Netanyahus, like Cohen's previous novels, is driven by the momentum of its prose. It has a freewheeling, all-consuming style which frequently turns up unexpected delights.... This is a surprising novel, full of quirks and explosive moments' - Christopher Shrimpton, Spectator
'No one writing in English today is more gifted than Joshua Cohen. Every page of The Netanyahus - an historical account of a man left out of history, a wickedly funny fable of the return of the repressed - crackles with Cohen's high style and joyride intelligence.' - Nicole Krauss, author of Forest Dark
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