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The Hand Before the Eye
Farbman is a hustling New York lawyer with a shiska wife and two kids, living beyond his financial and emotional means. Dunned by his creditors and distressed by an undiagnosed malaise of the soul, Farbman embodies the conflict between our altruistic impulse to help others and our selfish desire to elbow our way to the front of the line. The novel begins on Forty-Second Street in New York City. Farbman is on his way to an out-of-town funeral. He is rushing from a meeting with his unforgiving banker, to his chaotic office, to his parents' home, and then to the airport. Running late, Farbman considers canceling the trip, but doesn't. After the funeral, his lust for a fellow mourner leads him to an encounter with a mystic rabbi. The Hand Before the Eye is the often comic story of a contemporary man. With energetic and ironic prose, Donald Friedman take us into Farbman's world of law and medicine. Through Job-like suffering, Farbman gains enlightenment, learns the spiritual lessons of justice and healing. Finally , he understands that the good life offers us two true meaningful work and the love of another.
266 pages, Hardcover
First published December 15, 1999
4 people want to read
About the author
Donald Friedman
17 books45 followersSometime trial attorney and perennial procrastinator, presently novelist, short story writer, and essayist, I’m the author of the multiply translated The Writer’s Brush, Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers, which The New York Times Sunday Book Review described as “sparkling audaciously on every page,” and which the American Libraries Association called “a grand feat of research and interpretation.” My first novel, The Hand Before the Eye, black comic and shot through with religious themes—praised by Publishers Weekly for “its impassioned finale of spiritual redemption,” was a Vanity Fair Hot Type Recommendation. You’re My Dawg, Dog: A Lexicon of Dog Terms for People, has brought pleasure equally to dog and word lovers.
I was born in Philip Roth’s neighborhood, the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, but did most of my growing up in suburban South Orange. There, at ten, I enrolled in private art classes and began oil painting which continued through high school.
At Washington University, St. Louis, where, apart from occasional cartoon contributions to the college paper and private sketching, my art career came to an end, and my creative impulses were mainly expressed in fiction writing. It was then that I sensed a connection between the urge to draw and paint and to write, but had no idea what it could be. When I ran across a reference to D. H. Lawrence’s paintings it made an impression; as did a book of Henry Miller’s watercolors that someone gave me not long after.
In the years that followed graduation, after I’d gotten my J.D. from Rutgers Law School and an L.L.M. from New York University Law School, had started practicing law, married and raised two children, I continued to make notes about writers who were artists from which The Writer’s Brush eventuated. I also began to study fiction writing and to write in the early morning before going to work. Now I have three novels under my belt and a fourth in the works.
I was born in Philip Roth’s neighborhood, the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, but did most of my growing up in suburban South Orange. There, at ten, I enrolled in private art classes and began oil painting which continued through high school.
At Washington University, St. Louis, where, apart from occasional cartoon contributions to the college paper and private sketching, my art career came to an end, and my creative impulses were mainly expressed in fiction writing. It was then that I sensed a connection between the urge to draw and paint and to write, but had no idea what it could be. When I ran across a reference to D. H. Lawrence’s paintings it made an impression; as did a book of Henry Miller’s watercolors that someone gave me not long after.
In the years that followed graduation, after I’d gotten my J.D. from Rutgers Law School and an L.L.M. from New York University Law School, had started practicing law, married and raised two children, I continued to make notes about writers who were artists from which The Writer’s Brush eventuated. I also began to study fiction writing and to write in the early morning before going to work. Now I have three novels under my belt and a fourth in the works.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 8, 2023
A Delightful and Moving Secular Novel with a Religious Trajectory
Farbman is an unforgettable character, as is the plot that happens "to" him as a consequence of everything that he's been and done in his life, which is a sleazeball. The fact that one comes to feel for his plight is a remarkable achievement. The other characters are colorful and the descriptions of lawyering and doctoring that surround them are first-rate. Don't judge it because it has not been reviewed on Goodreads before, because this platform grew up after this book was published.
What I want to highlight are my takeaways about what I've called the religious trajectory of the book. The book dramatizes that:
1) The unexamined life will create consequences that are difficult to live with.
2) One has no choice but to accept that one cannot control, let alone manage, those consequences.
3) To grow beyond your present self requires complete acceptance of one's past.
4) It turning one's life around requires a constant spiritual practice and a vision of where one wants to head.
That's a whole lot to get from a novel that has plenty of escapades. But you won't escape from looking at your own life, at what you've wrought and how you could do better going forward
Farbman is an unforgettable character, as is the plot that happens "to" him as a consequence of everything that he's been and done in his life, which is a sleazeball. The fact that one comes to feel for his plight is a remarkable achievement. The other characters are colorful and the descriptions of lawyering and doctoring that surround them are first-rate. Don't judge it because it has not been reviewed on Goodreads before, because this platform grew up after this book was published.
What I want to highlight are my takeaways about what I've called the religious trajectory of the book. The book dramatizes that:
1) The unexamined life will create consequences that are difficult to live with.
2) One has no choice but to accept that one cannot control, let alone manage, those consequences.
3) To grow beyond your present self requires complete acceptance of one's past.
4) It turning one's life around requires a constant spiritual practice and a vision of where one wants to head.
That's a whole lot to get from a novel that has plenty of escapades. But you won't escape from looking at your own life, at what you've wrought and how you could do better going forward
Displaying 1 of 1 review