Toby Lloyd’s Fervor is an engrossing tale about when family secrets are deliberately revealed

Your friendly correspondents love a family saga, which is why we were thrilled when Toby Lloyd's debut novel, Fervor, came across our desks.

Toby Lloyd’s debut novel Fervor follows a devout, Jewish family in North London over the course of a decade as their once close-knit bonds begin to disintegrate.

The saga begins with the final hours of Yosef Rosenthal's life. Yosef is a Holocaust survivor who's been living with his son Eric, daughter-in-law Hannah, and their three children Gideon, Elsie, and Tovyah, for the last decade. Each of his grandchildren dutifully goes to visit him on his deathbed, and in return, each receives what is either a piece of wisdom or a cryptic message from Yosef as he gets ready to depart the Earth.

While none of them are sure quite what to make of his words, his death has a profound effect on each of them. Startlingly, the one most impacted seems to be Elsie, who was once regarded as the Rosenthal’s "perfect" middle child. The only daughter of the three, she begins to change in ways that confuse her family, friends, and teachers.

Her odd behaviors include suddenly writing violent stories, carrying a stone in her pocket, and seems to prefer spending time alone above anything else. Worst of all, the 14-year-old goes missing after school one day, an incident that throws the family into even more turmoil. 

After this opening action, the novel jumps ahead to Tovyah's first year at Oxford, told through the eyes of his neighbor Kate. It is mostly from her perspective that we see what's happened to the Rosenthals in the intervening years and discover the ways the past truly is inescapable.

We received access to review copies of Fervor through Avid Reader Press. You can purchase your own copy at our Bookshop storefront here. 

Asha: What did you think? I really liked the writing!

Lakshmi: I loved this book. It's astonishing for a lot of reasons-- one of which is that it is a DEBUT. Imagine hitting a grand slam at your first ever at-bat like this, if you will.

Asha: It's also interesting because it leaves so many questions!

Lakshmi: Yesssss. Over the years, we've talked a lot about unreliable narrators, and there are a BUNCH here and it's marvelous.

Asha: In some ways this story feels like a snippet in the lives of a family rather than a book with an overarching plot that gets resolved in the end.

Lakshmi: This is a ridiculous comparison (in terms of comparing excellent literary fiction to a not so excellent biopic) But I recently saw "Back to Black" (the Amy Winehouse biopic) so I was thinking of London's Jewish life already and reading this book right after was also kind of interesting?

(To be absolutely clear, the former's portrayal of London's Jewish life was iffy and confusing... this was vivid and sad and alive)

Asha: That does sound interesting

Lakshmi: (I realize that is a weird, weird, non-sequitur, dear readers hahaha)

Asha: I don't often read the marketing or press releases for the books you send me, but I will say that I saw that this book was marketed as more horror-adjacent than it actually is. I was expecting more mysticism, but other than Hannah thinking her daughter has been reading about Kabbalah, there isn't much supernatural in it.

Lakshmi: You know, that’s true. Now that I think about it, I think that I did put this book on our calendar because I thought it would be about Jewish ghosts – and it is! (Just not in the way you mean.)

But I also feel like we must talk about how much of this book's weirdness starts with Hannah! Yosef Rosenthal's daughter-in-law, Eric's wife, Elsie and Toyvah’s mother, all around firestorm, because Hannah's desires and self-centeredness really run this family for sure.

Asha: Hannah is definitely the driver!

Lakshmi:  AND SHE IS AN IN-LAW

So as you note in the intro, Yosef is a Holocaust survivor and his experiences during that horrific time were deliberately shrouded in secrecy. (Eric is not comfortable with exposing his children to too much of it when they are young, so their knowledge was spotty for years.)

Hannah, though, has PLANS. You see, she is a former journalist who feels stuck in her career after a promising start (and likely, after she began raising her family)

She realizes that Yosef has a story to tell the world-- and that SHE will be the one to tell it, whether he wants to or not.

Asha: It should be noted that while Hannah grew up Jewish, she didn't grow up Orthodox, so she's a convert to this way of life, which definitely makes her a zealot.

Lakshmi: I highlighted so many paragraphs about that! Because there is real ‘zeal of the convert’ energy to Hannah and everything she said.

Here’s what Hannah was like when she arrived at University:

Affluent, liberal, and fully assimilated, they had no need of old-world hocus pocus. As a girl, seeing a congregation filing into the sunlight after mass one Sunday, Hannah asked her

father why they never went to church. Because we’re not Christians, he said. But why don’t we go to Synagogue? Because we know better.

(This book is also very funny in a very dry, smug British way.) But, yes, she is very secular until early adulthood. And then she becomes a rising figure in British Jewish intellectualism. (if ‘intellectualism’ is the right word-- she is a firebrand and very provocative and controversial)

Asha: Do we ever get a clear picture of why she decided to become Orthodox?  (I was just listening to a podcast discussing Tradwives, which made me think that in the world of, probably freelance, journalism, she needed something predictable)

Lakshmi: I think we are supposed to fill in those gaps? It felt like she wanted to belong --- Plus, she is very ambitious and she saw that she could make a name for herself in the space?

(This book is not particularly flattering to Hannah, journalists, memoirists, or religious people. They all get verbally thrashed repeatedly.)

Asha: But no, the book definitely doesn't paint memoirists in a good light...

Lakshmi: But also, she is not a memoirist exactly. She is COMPLETELY co-opting her father-in-law's life (again an IN-LAW!) for her own purposes. This passage was chilling:

“I’m going to write it down. In a book.”

“No.”

“No?”

“This is my life, Hannah, it’s not your book.”

I had, of course, anticipated this resistance; it was one of my great

fears as I set out on the project. And if he’d pushed back at the start,

I might have given up. But since then, everything had changed. In the

months before we began, I was jobless and depressed. For too long I had endured the daily confrontation with purposelessness. The set- ting down of Yosef ’s life had reenergised me. Now I had it, work, realwork, the kind I could throw myself into with my entire being. I do not wish to diminish my father-in-law’s reservations, or his fears, but I did think at the time—and I still think now—that he was wrong.

History, be it yours, mine, or the next person’s, belongs to us all. And that’s what I told him.

“So you will write the book, even if I say no?”

“I’ve made up my mind.” Not only that. I had already spoken to my agent, pitched the idea to publishers.

“And the whole world will know what I did?”

“Anyone who reads will understand.”

“You think people are better than they are.”

Asha: It's not her story to tell, but she tells it anyway

Lakshmi: This man was getting ready to leave this life and he had to worry about her spilling his mess to everyone.

Asha: It feels timely with all the conversations about family vloggers whose kids haven't consented to having their lives broadcast on social media

Lakshmi: It feels timely with a lot of things!

Asha: Indeed

Poor Tovyah has to deal with everyone at Oxford knowing who his mother is and what she's written —- it's not a surprise that he's kind of recluse. (He’s at Oxford in the early 2000s at a time where there is a lot of campus debate and protest about Israel. The book’s “timeliness” has been noted in many reviews.)

Lakshmi: The scenes about Yosef's family in the thirties, when it was clear something very bad was about to happen-- it's so heartbreaking.

Longer than anyone else, Yosef ’s mother persisted in her belief that the occupying forces would treat them humanely. This was the nation of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Handel. Germans were sophisticated, they spoke languages, revered culture. Nothing like the Poles. In the face of reported beatings and killings, she rationalised,

“It’s like with a new boss. They start strict to give everyone a scare, then ease up later.”

Asha: If only that had been true

Lakshmi: I can see people believing it. It's hard to believe your neighbors will turn on you.

Asha: And for a bit it seems like Yosef and his brother's musical ability will save them, but of course it doesn't

Lakshmi: Yes, please explain that bit!

Asha: Yosef comes from a family of musicians, but he's the only one who didn't excel at the piano.

And it turned out that German soldiers liked people who could play the piano, even badly

so as long as they could entertain the soldiers they were safe...until they weren't

In the lager, Yosef wished he’d worked harder at the piano. “Some Jews got easy lives for themselves, playing in the band,” he explained to Hannah. While this might have been true, musicianship was no guarantee of safety. Yosef never saw any of his siblings or cousins again, despite their precision on violin, on the keys, and on the clarinet. The monsters put instruments in their hands, they made requests, they clapped and whistled derisively, and then they murdered them, all the same as the non-musical Jews, and burned the corpses afterwards, and sucked the ashes through the chimneys, and watched the drift of the black clouds.

But we've gotten off track a little. Yosef's story is an interesting one, but it's not Hannah's to tell – and she tells it anyway.

Lakshmi: But one of the beautiful things about this book is that there is SO MUCH story and Lloyd does it in a relatively short number of pages.

There's Hannah, There's Elsie, there's Tovyah, obviously this is one family and we spend time with each branch of the family tree, but the book never feels crowded.

Asha: Plus, even though most of it is told from an outside perspective: we also learn a lot about Kate.

Lakshmi: Yes! Kate's motivations and backstory are also pretty interesting.

Asha: Kate is a patrilineal Jew who's learning more about Judaism – which of course makes her a goy in the eyes of Hannah.

Lakshmi: I do think that some of the funniest parts of the book involve Hannah talking about Israel (the actual place) vs the Israel as a concept that she champions. Because her first child (who is often forgotten!) actually makes aliyah and moves. Hannah is NOT HAPPY about it.

I really do feel like I’ll remember parts of the following passage for a long time. (Read the whole thing, the kicker is incredible!):

But this is what you need to understand. Out there, in the big bad world, you will not win the fights. You won’t throw the last punch or even the first punch. You will be smashed

over the head before you can turn round. If you wake up at all, it will be in a hospital, where you will take your dinners through a straw. The world is stuffed with people bigger, uglier, and dirtier than you will ever be and they will tear you apart. The enemies of the Jews are stronger than us. Always have been. Why do you think for three thousand years, from Moses to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, we have been obsessed with the law? If you want to survive out there, do not trust

in your ability to win a fair fight. Believe me, there won’t be any fair fights. There won’t even be fights.”

Though Gideon had not been subjected to this exact speech before, the gist was familiar. This time, however, he had a ready comeback: “Not in Israel.”

“Excuse me?”

“In Israel, nobody pushes you around for being a Jew.”

“My son, the genius, meets one poodle of a Nazi thug, and he decides he wants to live in the desert. You don’t even like the heat.”

I'm sorry, I cracked up.

Asha: It is very funny.

Lakshmi: I thought about it, and I realized the reason it’s so funny is because of the bigger question of ‘who is Hannah in Israel?’ Of course she has no interest in living there–  she isn't anything special as an Israeli! She's special in London with her rhetorical devices and think tank-y takes and her books.

Asha: That's true, I actually didn't think of it that way.

Lakshmi: This passage is also startling and think should be read by any writer or essayist who draws from their own lives and the lives of their inner circle to fuel their work:

A famous poet once said that to be a writer was to bring ruin to a family; now she understood. She hadn’t given Yosef a second life on the page, she’d done the opposite. You fix

people in ink and you kill them. Even if they’re already dead, you kill them over. They can’t move, they can’t breathe, they can only lie there stiff, in whatever shape you bent them into. And if there’s a chance, they will have their revenge.

I do want to talk about Elsie before we go! but she is kind of a spector throughout the book

So Elsie, as the intro notes, is the only daughter of the house. She is deeply shaken when her grandfather passes away and she keeps running away and/or disappearing, and the family really wants to think the worst of her (or they don't know what to do... or both, I suppose?)

Asha: I honestly think it’s a little of both

Lakshmi: It often is!

Asha: She’s dealing with her grief in a way that they don’t understand. Also Yosef wanted to be cremated and Hannah refused, so Elsie is angry that his wishes were pushed aside

Lakshmi:  But Hannah thinking she is a 'witch', that is very old school South Asia. I guess that's old school all cultures. This poor man, none of his wishes were respected. 

Asha: They do put Elsie in therapy when she comes back after disappearing, but it doesn’t seem like therapy helps?

Lakshmi: She is an evasive one! And then the other siblings also don't know what there place is when one child takes up so much energy…

But, oh gosh, we have to talk about how Hannah acts during the disappearance. When Elsie first disappears as a teen, Hannah hypes it up to all of the newspapers, which (we've all seen that when friends of friends go missing)...

BUT HANNAH INSISTS ON TALKING ABOUT HER BOOKS IN THESE ARTICLES. Really, this lady is next level

Asha: Hahaha, she is something that’s for sure

Lakshmi: 

“Is this about the piece? You should be congratulating me.”

“You broke the dry spell. Mazel Tov.”

“I’m not talking about my career.”

She had insisted in being referred to in the article as a memoirist,

not a journalist. And at the bottom of the text, it had announced the

publication of her first book, due the following year. “Do you know

what their circulation is?”

Eric said nothing.

“Our daughter is missing, this isn’t some family secret. The more

people know, the better.”

HYPING YOUR BOOK WHEN YOUR ONLY DAUGHTER DISAPPEARS

talking about "circulation"!!!

incredible stuff

Asha: It’s so narcissistic

Lakshmi: So I will say this book is a bit hard to talk about because there are so many secrets (and we never want to spoil books)

Asha: We have to go, but my final thought is that I loved this final line in the LA Times review: “Fervor” is a puzzling but gripping novel. It leaves plenty of questions unanswered, which is no doubt frustrating to some readers, but which I found enjoyable — and very Jewish.

Lakshmi: YES. I don't regret a moment I spent with these very strange characters. I didn’t have time to really quote it, but this interview with the author was excellent and thought provoking. 

Each month, we’re sharing our current list of pop culture favs with readers! These are a few of our (current) favorite things!

What we are reading:

Lakshmi: I’m super excited to dive into editor and copywriter Karen Yin’s “The Conscious Style Guide: A Flexible Approach to Language That Includes, Respects, and Empowers.” The words we use matter and I’m so curious to learn more about inclusive vocabulary— particularly around marginalized identities. 

Asha: My hold on “Erasure” by Percival Everett came in. This is the novel that the movie “American Fiction” is based on, and it was so good! Highly recommend.

What we are watching:

Lakshmi: I got to catch the international premiere of Sumanth Bhat’s debut feature “Mithya” this weekend at the New York Indian Film Festival this weekend and I’m so glad I did. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but it centers a recently orphaned boy who moves from Mumbai to Udipi to live with his aunt and uncle after the deaths of his parents. (Added bonus, the film is in Kannada and Marathi, my two ancestral languages.)

Asha: The final season of “Star Trek: Discovery”, which I wanted to be so much better than it actually was…and has radicalized me against the weird “whisper acting” trend…

What we are listening to:

Lakshmi: Another thing I’ve been seeking out lately are podcasts about writers of color. One really interesting one is Black Prose, in which journalist Yolanthe Fawehinmi interviews different Black British writers. (As an aside I seem to be on a bit of a British podcast kick!) I’d recommend starting with the Black Prose interview with memoirist Safiya Sinclair (which you can listen to here.) 

I also have Arooj Aftab’s new album in my current rotation.

Asha: The aforementioned Trad Wives episode, of the “Sounds Like a Cult” podcast, and coincidentally “You’re Wrong About” also did an episode on the subject, so I’m off to listen to that as well.