Marc Estrin
Carrigan Review
Friday, November 10, 2006
THE EDUCATION OF ARNOLD HITLER. BY MARC ESTRIN. UNBRIDLED BOOKS. $15.95 PAPERBACK. 464 PAGES.
In a brilliant follow-up to his first novel, Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, Estrin offers a richly multi-layered coming of age story in which the hero struggles with the power of language and naming, the ambiguities of religious identity, the meaning of meaning, and the nature and force of alienation.
Part Huck Finn, part Eugene Gant (Look Homeward, Angel), part Oskar Matzerath (The Tin Drum), part Holden Caufield, and part Billy Budd, little Arnold Hitler makes his way from innocence to experience as he moves from the security of his small Texas town to the uncertain and often anxious world of Harvard during the Vietnam War protests and finally to the hustling world of the Bowery.
Arnold’s parents, George and Anna Hitler, wrap their only child in a blanket of love. His mother teaches Arnold to play chess, to read, to appreciate art, and how to converse with his Jewish grandfather through his knee. The precocious Arnold very quickly turns into a linguist, a chess master, and a commentator on the national news. In second grade he is encouraged to organize a “chess club, a reading club, and a greater-than-five-syllable-word-collecting-club.”
Before he enters high school, Arnold has become the town liberal and wise beyond his years. “Arnold remained popular with all his teachers, in spite of his outspokenly liberal positions on the U2 incident, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin Wall, the Soviet H-bomb, and the missile crisis. While others his age were religiously following Howdy Doody or Lassie, Arnold was reading the New York Times and writing critiques of articles in My Weekly Reader, comparing the facts presented with those in the newspaper of record.”
Throughout high school, Arnold remains popular, meets his first love, and stars as the quarterback on the football team. In spite of the glories of his adolescence, the sinister shadows of the world and his community reveal themselves in the town’s reaction to John Howard Griffin (the Mansfield, Texas, author who wrote Black Like Me), the Kennedy assassination (which Arnold witnesses up close), and the Vietnam War. While none of his friends ever tease him about his family name to his face, he receives notes in his locker on the eve of his graduation that insult and ridicule his “good looks” and “so-called intelligence.” Like the innocent Billy Budd who is betrayed by the evil John Claggart, Arnold hears the voice of his Claggart in these notes and decides it is time to move on.
When he enters Harvard, Arnold’s name turns into a liability he had never imagined. Potential roommates refuse to live with him, girls lose interest when they learn his last name, and neo-Nazis try to recruit him as their poster boy. At Harvard, Arnold hears Noam Chomsky lecture on linguistics, and chases after Chomsky to query him about the nature of names and the power of language. In his own way, Chomsky is something of a Claggart, for he gives Arnold little but a lecture in structuralism. Along the way at Harvard, though, he meets Al Gore (a fellow student) and Leonard Bernstein (whose daughter Arnold dates briefly). By the time he leaves Harvard, Arnold “seemed more bent and less handsome than he had been. There was a new tremor in his hand. His eyes were deeper in his skull. His mind was a question mark, walking.”
After Harvard, Arnold makes his way to New York where he ends up for a time living in the tenements of the Bowery. In a stroke of luck, a Newsday reporter writes a story on Arnold, and Arnold soon receives a letter from Evelyn Brown, a neo-Nazi stripper who takes him in and protects him from his Claggarts. They soon become lovers and build themselves a bunker beneath the Bruckner Expressway. She soon converts to Judaism, changes her name to Esther, and Arnold and Esther are married in a ceremony conducted by one of Arnold’s Bowery friends and Leonard Bernstein.
Yet, the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic contours of Arnold’s coming of age story simply provide Estrin the vehicle for his ingenious novel of ideas. Arnold may be a postmodern Billy Budd dogged by his Claggarts, but he is also a Joseph K. attempting to make his way inside a world from which he has been excluded by his name.
Even more cunning, though, is Estrin’s weaving of the work of Edmond Jabès into the novel. A darling of the late Jacques Derrida and the deconstructionists, Jabès invokes questions about the power of naming, the force of words, and the ambivalence of religious, especially Jewish, identity. Excerpts from Jabès’ writings appear at the beginning of each section, and both Arnold and Evelyn, who reads from Jabès’ book in her striptease act, immerse themselves in his work. Arnold’s theme through the book belongs to Jabès: “All invention flows from words. We are their tributaries. They mark us as strongly as we mark them.”
Estrin’s dazzling tale of Arnold’s journey from innocence to experience brilliantly highlights the many facets of an individual’s relationship to society and the power of culture to define individuals.
Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.