Reviews for The English Disease

The average rating for The English Disease based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-20 00:00:00 Alisandratou Dionisia After I re-read Skibell's 'A Blessing On The Moon' - a work bordering on classic in quality and demonstrating creative genius with aplomb - I went straight out and ordered his two other novels available at the time. The English Disease was in comparison, a great disappointment. Introverted, self-referential, a novel about narrative and voice, an exercise in sub-Woody Allen American angst, but sadly a different kettle of (gefilte) fish... The protagonist is a weak and frustrating character, dwarfed by the golem like grotesque of his 'colleague' Leibowitz. Leibowitz's Dickensian or Gargantuan presence eventually palls - it was a struggle to read through these chapters. Despite my having a natural infinity for the rôle imagined for the main character and the narrative setting, I found that there was a lack of a consistent dramatic arc or narrative pull. Skibell's satire is often times too dry and detached - the exception being his brilliant exposition on the Marx Brothers as an illustration of the increasingly pressing dilemma for American Jews, between a sterile, post liberal orthodoxy and integration or assimilation in liberal modernity. Despite the sprinkling of rabbinical style anecdotes, this novel was too much an exercise in writing about thinking and belief (also indirectly about writing) but lacked the deeper resonance of life or death events (or everlasting life in death consequences) so deftly conjured in 'A Blessing.." (which I urge you to read). I wonder if The English Disease was the earlier of the two works? Unfortunately, the content is a fulfilment of the title...

Review # 2 was written on 2009-08-06 00:00:00 Edward Papesh Obsessed to a fault with the interior life of an unlikeable character, far more self-absorbed than the gold miner in The Colour, embedded in a nearly plotless narrative preoccupied with the plight of the Jews. The author tries to express himself with the sort of intellectual virtuosity & humor that characterizes Tom Robbins's novels, but his ponderous, self-absorbed prose gets tiresome pretty quickly.