A Splendid Novel

It is hard to imagine a contemporary novel making life as difficult for itself, and then performing as creditably, as Waiting for the News.
Consider: an unfashionable subject—a Jewish labor organizer in Detroit in the late 1930s fighting on two flanks against the bosses and the labor hoods—and an uncompromising theme—evil exists, pure and simple, and ought to be exterminated. Stated so boldly, both matter and theme might suggest a book regorged from the memory of proletar...