Goodman, Allegra

PERSONAL:

Daughter of Lenn (a professor of philosophy) and Madeleine (a geneticist, epidemiologist, and dean) Goodman; married David Karger (a professor of computer science); children: four. Education: Graduated from Harvard University (magna cum laude), 1989; Stanford University, Ph.D., 1997.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Cambridge, MA.

CAREER:

Writer, novelist, and educator. Conducts occasional workshops, seminars, and writing classes.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Whiting Foundation Award, 1991, for Total Immersion; New York Times Notable Book of the Year Award, for The Family Markowitz; Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish fiction and National Book Award finalist, both for Kaaterskill Falls; Salon.com award for fiction; named one of the twenty best writers under forty by the New Yorker.

WRITINGS:

Total Immersion (stories), Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1989.

The Family Markowitz (stories), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1996.

Kaaterskill Falls (novel), Thorndike Press (Thorndike, ME), 1998.

Paradise Park (novel), Dial Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Intuition (novel), Dial Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Commentary, Good Housekeeping, Slate, American Scholar, and the New Yorker.

ADAPTATIONS:

Intuition was adapted to audio cassette.

SIDELIGHTS:

Allegra Goodman began her writing career when she sold her first story to Commentary magazine at age seventeen; her first collection of stories was published on the day she graduated from Harvard. Within months, she married classmate David Karger, and the couple moved to California, where they attended Stanford and began a family. They returned to Cambridge with their two sons when David accepted a position as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The eleven stories in Goodman's first collection, Total Immersion, were called "exhilarating" by a Publishers Weekly contributor, who noted that the characters "are observant Jews living in a believably rendered Oxford, England, or Honolulu, Hawaii. While committed to fixed principles, these people must adapt to a shifting, alien, and seductive world." A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the volume a "light, amusing work, impressive in its pan-shots and sharp, short needling." Library Journal critic Alice Shane named Total Immersion a "dazzling collection of short stories, replete with razor-sharp perceptions and a sense of high comedy."

The Family Markowitz is a collection of ten stories, all but one previously published in either the New Yorker or Commentary. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that Goodman "combines delicious comic set pieces with deeper meditations and conversations on Jewish identity, God, frazzled relationships amid the breakdown of family life." The installments span approximately ten years in the lives of three generations of a family, including memorable moments, the usual misunderstandings, and the affection, tensions, loneliness, and other emotions that become apparent under close scrutiny. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman called the characters "real people everyone can relate to." "The writing is so deft and affectionate, the skewed perceptions so familiar, the dialogue rings so painfully true and is so funny that the stories often feel lighter than they are," wrote Naomi Glauberman in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

The book begins with the death of Rose Markowitz's second husband, Maury Rosenberg, in New York City. Rose's family now consists of her two sons, Ed and Henry. Ed, a professor teaching at Georgetown University, is married to Sarah and is the father of four children; he has little time to spare for his mother and little understanding of his college-age children. One daughter is a vegetarian, and another, Miriam, is a Harvard Medical School student who embraces orthodoxy and is strictly kosher. Henry, who is unmarried and in therapy as he grapples with his sexual identity, brings his mother to Venice, California, where he works in an art gallery. But after a few years of listening to her harping, Henry drops her off at a senior citizens' facility and heads to Oxford, England, to manage a Laura Ashley store. Rose's regular visitor becomes Alma Renquist, a graduate student who interviews her for a thesis. Glauberman called Goodman "brilliant at capturing the clutter of both interior and exterior life—her characters often say one thing while their minds are elsewhere." Claire Messud wrote in a New York Times Book Review article that The Family Markowitz "has great consistency and charm. One of the characters reflects that ‘there must be a way to draw with human sight. There has to be a rule for finding significant details, a method of selective focus.’ And this is Ms. Goodman's own project: the stories' details are selective and significant, and draw upon the wealth of Jewish culture out of which Ms. Goodman writes. It is their weight and accuracy that make the collection so entertaining." Among the stories in the volume are "The Four Questions," about a Passover dinner, "Mosquitoes," which finds Ed at an interfaith conference in rural Minnesota, and "The Persians," in which Ed and Sarah shop for an appropriate book to be given as a bat mitzvah gift to the daughter of friends. Salon.com critic Dwight Garner felt that Goodman's "unfussy, matter-of-fact style borrows from Grace Paley and Philip Roth, but in The Family Markowitz … Goodman sounds like nobody else. You move through these smart and slyly funny stories … with an increasing appreciation of her deep-seated talent."

Kaaterskill Falls, Goodman's first novel, takes place between the years 1976 and 1978. It is a story about three families who belong to a Washington Heights community of Orthodox Jews led by Rav Elijah Kirshner. Each summer the families go with their rabbi to the Catskills in upper New York State to vacation. In failing health, Rav Kirshner is faced with choosing which of his sons, Isaiah or Jeremy, will inherit the religious community. The loyal but dull Isaiah, with the help of his wife, Rachel, has served as his father's secretary, while the older son, Jeremy, is a scholar who favors the secular over the religious world. Another family includes Isaac Shulman and his wife, Elizabeth, who are the parents of five daughters. Elizabeth, who longs to have something of her own, receives permission from Elijah to open a small kosher grocery in Kaaterskill, New York. The third family is headed by Andras Melish, a character New Leader reviewer Tova Reich called "perhaps the most interesting in the book."

Salon.com reviewer Laura Green felt that in Kaaterskill Falls, "the broad canvas does mute the reader's response to individual characters; we feel interest in many, but allegiance to none. To the extent that Goodman chooses a primary consciousness, it's Elizabeth's; most readers will easily sympathize with her desire for ‘the quick and subtle negotiations of the outside world.’ But Goodman refuses to make Kaaterskill Falls a story of individual triumph over stifling communal norms." Ruth R. Wisse wrote in Commentary: "Like the teaching of Rav Kirshner, this novel points in contradictory directions, inward to the specifically Jewish and outward to the embrace of America. Goodman's description of the difficult succession from the Rav to his younger son quite brilliantly suggests how and why in contemporary Jewish life Orthodoxy can become ‘ultra-Orthodoxy,’ how behavior becomes stricter, more defensive, more rigid. And the personal rivalry between the brothers Jeremy and Isaiah hints at why the cultural rivalry between the secular and religious branches of American Jewry is unlikely to go away." Alice McDermott, writing in Commonweal, called the novel "a tapestry, a panoramic view of a community, a people, and a place."

The protagonist-narrator of Goodman's next novel, Paradise Park, is Sharon Spiegelman, a nonpracticing Jew from Boston who winds up in Hawaii in 1974 with her folk-dancing partner, Gary, a flaky, older graduate student who has dragged Sharon up and down the West Coast as he works for liberal causes. Entertainment Weekly contributor Lisa Schwarzbaum noted that "Sharon is a notable departure from Goodman's family-oriented heroines—a young woman estranged from blood relatives. Her parents are divorced, her brother dead, and her spiritual interests grow as much from her need to create family out of friends, lovers, and workmates as they do out of a hunger in her soul." The man Sharon worships eventually dumps her at a flea-bag hotel in Waikiki, the bill for which he fails to pay, and skips to Fiji with a wealthy German woman. Sharon, who is on a perpetual quest to find God, now has reality to deal with and works at a number of jobs, including catching cockroaches that are then electroplated and sold. Her new Christian Hawaiian boyfriend, Kekui, is banished from his family because of their relationship, and they spend a year growing pot in a plot of jungle owned by the government. Sharon also works at a number of more usual jobs—as a temp secretary, a cashier in a restaurant called Mambo Zippy's, and as a practice patient for medical students. She lives in the house of a drug dealer, in a monastery where she must be silent for four months, and in a co-op house where she has to fight her biologist roommates for the right to keep her cat.

"In typical picaresque style, Goodman builds a broad depiction of society by pitting her heroine against a vast succession of people and institutions," wrote Joyce Hackett in the Boston Review. "She renders a perfectpitch portrait of the lost generation of 1970s hippies, both the zealous, earnest grandiosity with which they intended to remake the world and the aimless desolation induced by repudiating one set of conventional ties after another…. The funniest parts of this very funny book are Goodman skewering the pettiness and reductionism of so much of human spiritual searching."

The novel's title comes from the name of a bird park Sharon visits with her boyfriend of the moment, a thuggish marine. She compares the birds who bounce off the mesh ceilings that confine them in their beautiful, contrived forest with the birds she observed flying free on a remote island where she worked for a summer counting red-footed boobies with ornithologists. But even the peace of that paradise dissolved when the tiny red mites that feasted on the birds migrated to the heads of the humans.

For a time, Sharon embraces Christianity and then Buddhism, but she finally meets people who arrange for her to spend the summer at a Hasidic girls' school in Bellevue, Washington. After the summer, she goes to Brooklyn with one of the students, where she meets Mikhail, a Russian-born Orthodox Jew and pianist. They marry, and ultimately she reconnects with her parents. "Like a snow globe shaken hard, Spiegelman floats around in the events of her life until inertia causes her to settle," wrote Neal Wyatt in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that "readers will finish the novel feeling that, given faith in the ultimate goodness of life, things can turn out all right."

"As a narrator Sharon proves sympathetic and compelling, her story a kind of stressed-out confession full of run-on sentences," stated Emily White in the Voice Literary Supplement. "Because she barely trusts herself, she often doubles back, tries to explain, directly beseeches the reader, ‘Let me tell you,’ as if we might not allow her to finish. Allegra Goodman's great achievement in Paradise Park is the way Sharon forms a subtle, needy, and highly active relationship with the reader." Melanie Rehak commented in Harper's Bazaar that "Paradise Park can be exhausting at times—Sharon, frankly, can be a bit exasperating—but Goodman's talent for channeling voices makes us eager to see the character through to the end." Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Carolyn See praised the first two hundred pages of the novel. "The charm … here has to do with the dissonance between Sharon's ‘seeking’ self as she remembers it and the utter pain-in-the-rear she was in real life." "Long winded and often comically clueless, the protagonist of Paradise Park may not be a very heroic heroine, but she's an endearingly human one in her neverending search for self-knowledge," wrote Judith Wynn in the Boston Herald.

"Books of spiritual searching are not new, of course," wrote Maude A. McDaniel in the World and I, "but a seeker like Sharon is surely out of the ordinary in the literary world. Yet in her vernacular, yes, even shallow, approach to the whole matter of finding God, she breaks new ground. Goodman may be no Dostoyevsky, but in this case, Goodman is more than good enough." In a New York Times Book Review article, Jennifer Schuessler wrote that "the challenge with a questing first-person narrator is to give him or her a voice the reader wants to follow into the wilderness of a made-up world, and one that allows us to see more of the tale than the teller does. Think Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield…. Sharon's got the voice all right; the novel is a bright bauble of clear, rain-washed prose and low-key humor." Commentary contributor John Podhoretz felt that "Allegra Goodman's willingness to experiment with new voices, and new ways of telling her brilliantly conceived stories of Jews in conflict with modernity, only makes us hungry for more." Time reviewer Paul Gray concluded: "Like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth before her, Goodman has achieved a breakthrough book by discovering and recording a thoroughly uninhibited narrative voice."

With her novel Intuition, Goodman offers a "delicate analysis of how an ethics scandal filters through the sensibility of brilliant and brilliantly realized characters," commented Jennifer Reese in Entertainment Weekly. "It's a tricky operation that Goodman performs with the precision of a scientist, and the flair of an artist at the top of her game." The story centers on four cancer researchers at the cash-strapped Philpot Institute in Cambridge, MA. The institute's director, Marion Mendelssohn, is a careful and cautious scientist. Her codirector and philosophical opposite, Sandy Glass, is a brash, outgoing doctor and administrator with excellent political and people skills. Cliff and Robin are post-doctoral researchers at the institute, embroiled in an on-again, off-again relationship and laboring under the stress of high-stakes research. As the lab's work grinds on with little progress, Cliff's experiments suddenly show astonishing results when a previously ineffective virus appears to have the effect of shrinking tumors in mice.

Recognizing the huge potential of Cliff's findings—medically, financially, and as a career-making discovery—Mendelssohn encourages caution and further study. Glass, on the other hand, wants to announce the discovery immediately before the results are replicated or confirmed, thinking it better to be in error than to risk having another laboratory claim the process first. Glass courts the media and touts the breakthrough, but in the background, Robin makes a disturbing discovery of her own: the possibility that Cliff's discovery is a sham, his results fabricated or, at best, exaggerated. When the effects of this discovery come crashing down on the institute in the form of scandal and congressional investigations, the lives of all four characters are irrevocably changed. "Goodman's sympathetic yet floundering characters are compelling, their conflicts provocative, and her writing spellbinding" as the story of their conflict and quandary unfolds, stated Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman. Goodman's portrayal of the characters and their situation unfolds in a "riveting, calibrating narrative revelation while preserving the ambiguities of scientific dispute," remarked Zackary Sholem Berger in Forward. "This is moral fiction without moralizing," Berger concluded. "In deft, tight, and wonderfully playful prose," Goodman "creates characters whose strengths and weaknesses intertwine in close encounters at home, at work, at synagogue, and at play" commented reviewer Sally Vallongo in the Toledo Blade. A New Yorker reviewer commented favorably on the "aesthetic delicacy of Goodman's writing." Goodman "draws tender but unflinching portraits" of her characters, observed a Publishers Weekly reviewer, deriving a "truly humanist novel from the supposedly antiseptic halls of science."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

America's Intelligence Wire, April 14, 2006, Rhonda Shafner, "Allegra Goodman Talks about Her New Novel about a Cancer Research Laboratory," profile of Allegra Goodman.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 11, 2001, David Kirby, "Books: Flighty Truth-Seeker in ‘Paradise’ Would Be Right at Home in '60s," p. D4.

Book, March, 2001, Chris Barsanti, review of Paradise Park, p. 76.

Booklist, September 15, 1996, Donna Seaman, review of The Family Markowitz, p. 203; July, 1998, Vanessa Bush, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 1856; January 1, 2000, Karen Harris, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 948; February 1, 2001, Neal Wyatt, review of Paradise Park, p. 1039; December 15, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of Intuition, p. 5.

Boston Herald, March 25, 2001, Judith Wynn, "On the Road to ‘Paradise’—Flighty Heroine Recounts Her Odyssey to Adulthood," p. 58.

Boston Review, April-May, 2001, Joyce Hackett, review of Paradise Park, p. 34.

Commentary, December, 1998, Ruth R. Wisse, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 67; May, 2001, John Podhoretz, review of Paradise Park, p. 70.

Commonweal, November 6, 1998, Alice McDermott, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 16.

Entertainment Weekly, March 16, 2001, Lisa Schwarzbaum, "The Wanderer: A Boom in Fiction by Jewish-American Women Continues with Allegra Goodman's Vital Paradise Park," p. 60; March 3, 2006, Jennifer Reese, "Lab Dances: In Allegra Goodman's Intuition, a Team of Cancer Researchers Turn on One Another," review of Intuition, p. 104.

Forward, April 7, 2006, Zackary Sholam Berger, "Allegra Goodman's Science Fiction," review of Intuition.

Harper's Bazaar, March, 2001, Melanie Rehak, "Holy Daze," p. 336.

Houston Chronicle, June 24, 2001, Harvey Grossinger, "Allegra Goodman Heroine Learns a Song of Sharon," p. 21.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1989, review of Total Immersion, p. 403.

Kliatt, September, 2006, Nola Theiss, audiobook review of Intuition, p. 50.

Library Journal, May 15, 1989, Alice Shane, review of Total Immersion, p. 88; August, 1996, Molly Abramowitz, review of The Family Markowitz, p. 116; June 15, 1998, Beth E. Andersen, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 105; August, 1999, Joyce Kessel, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 163; January 1, 2001, Yvette Olson, review of Paradise Park, p. 154; January 1, 2006, Starr E. Smith, review of Intuition, p. 96.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 16, 1997, Naomi Glauberman, "Life Is Elsewhere," p. 10.

Nation, November 23, 1998, Tom LeClair, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 27.

New Leader, October 5, 1998, Tova Reich, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 18.

New Yorker, March 20, 2006, "Briefly Noted," review of Intuition, p. 149.

New York Times, June 26, 1997, Sara Rimer, "A Fiction Writer without Neuroses?," p. C1; March 5, 2006, Sue Halpern, "Scientific Americans," review of Intuition; March 21, 2006, Gina Kolata, "Writer Depicts Scientists Risking Glory for Truth and Truth for Glory," review of Intuition, p. F3.

New York Times Book Review, September 10, 1989, Randi Hacker, review of Total Immersion, p. 26; October 22, 1996, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Family Markowitz, p. B2; November 3, 1996, Claire Messud, "The Autumn of the Matriarch," p. 14; August 21, 1998, Michiko Kakutani, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 40; August 30, 1998, Daphne Merkin, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 13; March 11, 2001, Jennifer Schuessler, "Looking for Love: Abandoned in Hawaii, the Heroine of Allegra Goodman's Novel Embarks on a Spiritual Quest," p. 10; June 3, 2001, review of Paradise Park, p. 26.

Publishers Weekly, March 24, 1989, review of Total Immersion, p. 58; July 15, 1996, review of The Family Markowitz, p. 54; May 25, 1998, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 62; July 27, 1998, Ivan Kreilkamp, "Allegra Goodman: A Community Apart," p. 48; January 1, 2001, review of Paradise Park, p. 64; December 5, 2005, review of Intuition, p. 29; April 3, 2006, audiobook review of Intuition, p. 67.

School Library Journal, October, 2001, Jan Tarasovic, review of Paradise Park, p. 194.

Time, March 26, 2001, Paul Gray, "Portnoy, Move Over: Allegra Goodman's Breakthrough Novel Follows a Flower Child on Her Comic Quest for Enlightenment," p. 72.

Toledo Blade, March 26, 2006, Sally Vallongo, "Characters Shine in New Novel of Scientific Intrigue," review of Intuition.

U.S. News & World Report, March 12, 2001, Marc Silver, "Like Jane Austen, Only Jewish," p. 82.

Vogue, August, 1998, Mary Cantwell, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. 142.

Voice Literary Supplement, March, 2001, Emily White, "Escape Clause."

Wall Street Journal, August 14, 1998, Pearl K. Bell, review of Kaaterskill Falls, p. W7; March 16, 2001, Bella Stander, review of Paradise Park, p. W8.

Washington Post Book World, March 2, 2001, Carolyn See, "Seeking Is Believing," p. C06; February 26, 2006, Ron Charles, interview with Allegra Goodman, p. 3; February 26, 2006, Geraldine Brooks, "Experimenting with the Truth," review of Intuition, p. 3.

World and I, June, 2001, Maude A. McDaniel, "A Flake for All Seasons," p. 246.

ONLINE

Allegra Goodman Home Page, http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/˜karger/allegra.html (January 7, 2007).

BookPage,http://www.bookpage.com/ (January 2, 2007), Alden Mudge, "Coming of Age on the Rollicking Road to Paradise," interview with Allegra Goodman.

Bookreporter.com,http://www.bookreporter.com/ (March 3, 2006), Joni Rendon, interview with Allegra Goodman; (January 2, 2007), review of Paradise Park, and Joni Rendon, review of Intuition.

Bookslut.com,http://www.bookslut.com/ (May, 2006), Barbara J. King, "Allegra Goodman's World of Science," review of Intuition.

Powells.com,http://www.powells.com (January 2, 2007), Dave Weich, interview with Allegra Goodman.

Salon.com,http://www.salon.com/ (November 5, 996), Dwight Garner, review of The Family Markowitz; (July 31, 1998) Laura Green, review of Kaaterskill Falls.