Burning Down the House: A Nick Hoffman Novel (Nick Hoffman Mystery)

Rating:
Summary: Didn't measure up
Review: Anyone who says satire is based on understatement doesn't know the
difference between satire and irony. This terrific book is in the
grand (and wild) satirical tradition of academic satirists like
Kingsley Amis. I don't know the author and have no need to defend
him, but the nasty, narrow-minded comments here seem written by
people with an axe to grind or whose buttons have been pushed by
this funny, but deep book that takes lots of risks..

Rating:
Summary: endless ruminations
Review: I can't quite support the idea that Burning Down the House a mystery or a suspense story. On that score, I need to say right off, it was a little disappointing. However, I can't get into the degree of analysis that some of the detractors of the book have gone to in their reviews.. This is entertainment! It is not intended to be one of the great canons of western literature. A few folks need to lighten up a little. When you read a mystery with a red pen, it's bound to be an unenjoyable experience!

Lev Raphael's Burning Down the House is an extremely well written, very funny, tale of the cast of characters to be found on a typical college campus. While the author's characters were vivid in their own right, I couldn't help myself from adding a few of my own assortment of "faces and characters" to Raphael's prototypes. For me, this was a laugh out loud book throughout. Well written. Excellent use of more than fourth grade vocabulary, and a nice addition to the Nick Hoffman series.

My only recommendation for the next installment is that Raphael develop his ending more completely before he starts leading us there. In this one it appears as if the ending wasn't something that the author put much effort into ahead of time.

All in all, highly recommended -- a funny and enjoyable read. I would compare Burning Down the House to Jane Smiley's MOO and to John Hassler's two books on college/university life.All four are thoroughly delightful tales on the more humous (and sometimes frustrating) sides of higher education.

Rating:
Summary: Stellar!
Review: I have read all the Nick Hoffman series and they keep getting better. Mr. Raphael knows how to superbly blend Judaica, gay relationships and academia. It is not often a mystery story also informs, such as, the tensions of a gay male marriage or the inside backstabbing of college campuses. I know these climes. Mr. Raphael makes them palatable, funny (some times) and delighfully wicked. I pass at least 5 bookstores a day en route to work, and I have chased down Mr. Raphael's works for his use of language, his integration of wonderful quotes and for making the reading experience a woven tapestry, not some wretched car chase. Bravo! I say this as a reader of history, mystery and biography who comsumes 6-10 books a week. I won't suffer through anything unless it scintillates. This author does.

Rating:
Summary: Sorry, Nick, you flunked out this time!
Review: I would like to add one more expression to the myriad of multilingual musings that salt and pepper this book in the guise of intellectual inspiration - and that is caveat emptor! Unfortunately, the reader won't be able to say they weren't warned - actually, twice warned. First, on the book cover where the former "A Nick Hoffman Mystery" subtitle has been replaced by a new "A Nick Hoffman Novel" subtitle. Then, on page 24 when Nick's lover Stefan, a novelist himself, tells us how he would write a mystery. "Why not create tension differently and have the murder come late - or maybe not at all - play expectation, threat or menace. The threat of a crime." That's exactly what Raphael does with this book. And after building up the expectation of something going to "happen" he just leaves us with the expectation of something bigger and more menacing yet to come in the next book of the series.

Don't get me wrong, I have enjoyed the author's writing skills in the first four books in this series. He has used wit and satire to spear the pompous world of academe. Unfortunately, in this book, SUM (State University of Michigan) and its inhabitants have become a total lampoon of some Animal House. Things are pushed to the point of straining a person's credulity - Whiteness Studies and neo-Nazi administrative staff.

Add to that the fact that all the female characters from the new provost Merry Glinka to Juno Dromgoole are just caricatures drawn in a very unflattering and unfavorable manner. Only the elderly and infirm are spared the author's misogyny. Which only makes it stranger when Nick, who has spent a lifetime (and 15 years with Stefan) with a totally male sexual orientation, suddenly becomes obsessed with what it would be like to have sex with Juno Dromgoole. I thought this was just an early mid-life crisis, until he developed and equally strange obsession to buy a gun. Good grief, he's turning into another one of the SUMatics!

Talk about topsy-turvy! The characters are just wandering around searching not for the plot, but for some reason why they are there in the first place. I realize that as a "novel" this book is entitled to have an ambiguous ending. But, since the author is a student of the mystery genre he should realize that it's not nice to leave your readers hanging at the close of a 290-page book. Nick Hoffman worked better in the mystery genre. My rating - a full ***** for the author's way with words, but only ** for the book as a whole. Sorry, Nick, even grading on a curve couldn't get you a higher score.

As a final comment, what's with the book jacket illustration featuring the face from a Third Reich sculpture? Taken with the Whiteness Studies and the new storm-trooper staff, does this point to a fascist plot to take over SUM?

Rating:
Summary: Playing with Fire
Review: In Burning Down the House, Lev Raphael takes his hero Nick Hoffman into strange new terrain. Witty and incisive stories, murder with acadmeic satire on the side have ben the delightful norm for the series. This installment takes a darker, more challenging turn. (Though the characteristic wit, the ironic turns and the celebration of the pleasures of life--food and wine and the fundamental joys of great sex between two people who love and know each other well--are still there.)

It opens with a quote from Rebecca West on the tension between the yearning for "the longer day of happiness" and that which wants to "die in a ccatstrophe that will set back life to its beginning" and "leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundation."

Nick Hoffman's life in Burning Down the House mirrors this tension. There's the normal tensions of his life--torn between the idiocy of academia at SUM (State Univerisity of Michigan and his love of teaching which requires that he not only put up with the craziness of EAR (his department) but struggle for tenure. Then there's the joy of his settled and pleasurable life with his partner Stefan and an attraction to the danger and violence--even the fear--that is becoming increasingly part of life at SUM.

Whiteness studies? Administrative spies?

A Diversity Tree?

Nick is worried about his close cousin Sharon who is recovering from surgery for acoustic neuromoma, more and more he is becoming aware the world is not a kindly place, not a place to be trusted.

He doesn't even trust himself. He's confused to discover--after years of a committed relationship with Stefan--his attraction to another professor. A female one, the ever dramatic, flamboyant Juno Dromgool--who is running for department chair and thinks she's being stalked. She's bought a gun.

He thinks about buying a gun. And having sex with Juno.

Nick seems to be torn between maintaining his "house" or following passion, loyalty--a maelstrom of feelings--and maybe burning down his house.

This is paralleled though and far more painfully by watching the world of SUM--however petty and ego driven it has been--degenerate into something not identified yet, the undercurrent of something symbolized by a drive for "whitness studies" and a "diversity" that is blindly "Christian."

The ending is not an ending, but a beginning as Nick has to make a choice to engage this darkness (and risk losing his present life) or turn away....

Rating:
Summary: Burning with Suspense
Review: Lev Raphael has managed with his Nick Hoffman series to not only entertain us with Academia and Murder, but has gone beyond the "formula". Like Nick and Stefan in the kitchen, Lev has added the extra ingredients to his characters that make them more real to the reader.
His most recent addition to the Nick Hoffman series, burning Down the House, is a definite variation on the normal mystery theme. It takes the reader through the twist and turns of "the mystery" at hand, as well as Nick's on-going inner dilemma with an attraction for a certain other professor. And, unlike most series mysteries, rather than the tale ending with the catching of the killer, a much larger, more encompassing story begins to unfold. Apparently our boy Nick is in for more than just a tidy murder in his next adventure...

Rating:
Summary: A compelling read.
Review: This books starts off funny, drew me right into the story. I kept watching for a major crime (murder) but there wasn't one. One of the book's characters said the worst mysteries are when there's a murder right off. I totally disagree with him. I didn't recognize it as a forwarning but it wasn't long after that that I noticed the cover of the book said "novel", not mystery. But by then I was engrossed in Nick's problems and read on through the night to the end, which was a little disappointing. I notice there are many reviews here by people posting their first and only review. This suggests that whether they did or did not like the book, they too, felt compelled to keep reading to the end, just as I did.

Rating:
Summary: Stellar!
Review: This series has to be one of the most under-rated in the country. It's witty, well-written, compelling and original.
The latest installment takes the academic satire to new highs and new lows and presents the narrator with profound dilemmas. The scenes where Nick contemplates and then actually goes shopping for a gun, because he feels so threatened and vulnerable, are pricelss: touching, disturbing, and very funny. Nobody else could pull off this combination so deftly.

Rating:
Summary: BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
Review: This was the first book I read in the series, and when I was done I started reading the others. Burning Down the House is by far the best of the series. Raphael's writing has gotten better with each new book, and his heroes have grown more human. As an escaped academic, I enjoyed the scenes of Byzantine intrigue among the faculty of the EAR department, and I appreciated Nick's ambivalence in dealing with his colleagues from his relatively powerless position. Raphael has a good grasp of university life and politics, and his wit is sharp and to the point. That he leaves loose ends at the finish whets our appetite for the next adventure.