In a first novel rich with feeling, Allegra Goodman is at home in the insular world of orthodox jews

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 9, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

Goodman has taken that fecundity of insights about the human condition to much wider fields in her first novel, which depicts a panoply of characters -- most of them Orthodox Jews -- in their summer and winter communities in upstate New York and Washington Heights. Spanning several seasons in the mid-1970s, ``Kaaterskill Falls'' is a carefully wrought architecture of a particularly insulated world: one where the women play badminton in long woolen skirts (when they play at all), where a son can be cruelly condemned by his rabbinical father for traveling on the Sabbath. The slow, languorous rhythms of the novel mirror the intensity of the internal lives it portrays, whether a devoted man's daily prayers or his wife's steadfast yearning to find a creative path within the strictures of her faith.

Admirably rich in nuance and detail, ``Kaaterskill Falls'' sets out to compose an entire tapestry, and certainly in its gradually realized world of interrelated friends and neighbors, it succeeds. But where Goodman's stories were steeped in irony and acumen, her novel seems intent upon cautionary gravitas. Where ``The Family Markowitz'' was agile and laconic, relying on its dialogue for character appraisal, ``Kaaterskill Falls'' is somber and sometimes pedantic, instructing us infinitely about a character's failings or strengths or glimpses of despair. The problems with the book are common to first novels, but they are also problems that can only befall a gifted writer -- errors of too much care, rather than too little.

At the center of Goodman's world are the contrasting characters of Isaac Shulman and Andras Melish. Isaac is a member of the separatist Orthodox community of the Kirshners, Andras an older, successful importer who has tried to discard God along with his memories of the Holocaust. The men leave the work of the city behind them each week when they carpool together to Kaaterskill; this is a novel about the interstices of faith and culture, not the labor done outside the home to put food on the table. Accordingly, such insularity hovers over the rest of the characters: Elizabeth, Isaac's wife and the mother of their five children (all, to his quiet regret, daughters); Nina, the beautiful Argentinian woman Andras has married, but cannot seem to love; Rav Kirshner, the aging rabbi who is succumbing to Parkinson's and trying to decide which of his sons -- the brilliant renegade, Jeremy, or the earnest plodder, Isaiah -- will succeed him.

Cloistered in another way entirely are the year-rounders of Kaaterskill, who together display a range of reactions toward the Kirshners from anti-Semitic arrogance to bemused tolerance. Most potentially compelling is an old woman Andras stumbles upon in the woods one day; a famous but reclusive nature photographer, she inadvertently instructs him in his own fear of death. There's also the wonderfully wild Syrian girl, Stephanie, who takes Andras's daughter under her wing with the wish to make her fly. Both characters disappear too soon (and, for structural purposes, too abruptly), but they're indicative of a strain in the novel of secular freedom -- the outsiders who challenge their tamer counterparts to reach for their dreams.

This rebellion generally takes a fairly muted form: Dear Elizabeth, whose faith and motherhood have eclipsed her aesthetic yearnings, ventures quietly into the world of business; Andras, whose terrible past has numbed his heart, has to learn how to outlive his memories. Jeremy and Isaiah, attending to their father's death, have their own legacies and battles to wage, but the real leaps will be left to the children -- journeys through libraries and the bravery handed them by parental love that will send them out into the world. One of the finer elements of ``Kaaterskill Falls'' is its attention to children as fully formed characters -- a quality so obvious that you don't realize its absence in most novels this densely populated until you applaud it here. The children are the hope and bedrock of these families, and consequently of the story itself: The religious instruction and the piano lessons and the inevitable frustrations of childhood will take them into uncharted lands.

The quiet dignity of Goodman's novel is its real strength, for in her impeccable depiction of the Kirshner community, she has wrought an entire world. And for all its seclusion, it is hardly a world without compromise; even Rav Kirshner privately mourns what his followers have lost, which is the beauty of a rich, prewar European Jewish culture without horror or vigilance. Such moments of revelation are the most moving parts of ``Kaaterskill Falls,'' but they are elliptical -- the unspoken tragedies that govern this milieu, even if they're scarcely recognized.

Oddly, though, some of the sorrows of this novel are so muted that I often couldn't tell if they were Goodman's intentionally delivered losses, or my own interpretation of them as such. As a modern, non-Jewish woman, I both rue Elizabeth's narrow path and also cringe at my reaction to it: How can I understand the joys or the constrictions of such a rigorous, devout life? There are many ways in which ``Kaaterskill Falls'' is a novel of lamentation -- grieving the same things as the Rav -- but its striving toward empathic regard is so painstaking, so careful, that it nearly overshadows its authorial viewpoint. Goodman has taken her considerable humanity and her literary skills and visited them upon this exquisitely limned landscape, which is above all a novel with mercy at its center. But whether she meant to or not, she has imbued that story with an undertow of ambivalence and subdued despair.

The Rav chose to leave, and he chose a new way, a life of greater separation. He has built a community of vigilance, a careful, cautious American generation. How strange that none of them see their piety is a way of mourning. How strange the way they embrace it in its severity. They don't know the difference. They are born now with the severity within them, although they do not know it. It cannot be otherwise, and yet it saddens him. The Rav remembers the expansiveness of his own youth, and the feeling of possibility. He had read great and beautiful books in German. He had pursued wonderful imaginative voyages. Life was golden to him, and the world his treasure house and laboratory. He could not see it then as he sees it now, a place with neither goodness nor mercy. Where he received his beautiful education, he lost parents and sisters, a family, a people. He cannot believe in the world anymore. Only in God. There is only God.

ALLEGRA GOODMAN, from ``Kaaterskill Falls''