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Summary
Summary
New York Times Book Review's "100 Notable Books of 2016"
The author of the critically admired, award-winning A Replacement Life turns to a different kind of story--an evocative, nuanced portrait of marriage and family, a woman reckoning with what she's given up to make both work, and the universal question of how we reconcile who we are and whom the world wants us to be.
Maya Shulman and Alex Rubin met in 1992, when she was a Ukrainian exchange student with "a devil in [her] head" about becoming a chef instead of a medical worker, and he the coddled son of Russian immigrants wanting to toe the water of a less predictable life.
Twenty years later, Maya Rubin is a medical worker in suburban New Jersey, and Alex his father's second in the family business. The great dislocation of their lives is their eight-year-old son Max--adopted from two teenagers in Montana despite Alex's view that "adopted children are second-class."
At once a salvation and a mystery to his parents--with whom Max's biological mother left the child with the cryptic exhortation "don't let my baby do rodeo"--Max suddenly turns feral, consorting with wild animals, eating grass, and running away to sit face down in a river.
Searching for answers, Maya convinces Alex to embark on a cross-country trip to Montana to track down Max's birth parents--the first drive west of New Jersey of their American lives. But it's Maya who's illuminated by the journey, her own erstwhile wildness summoned for a reckoning by the unsparing landscape, with seismic consequences for herself and her family.
Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo is a novel about the mystery of inheritance and what exactly it means to belong.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This touching second novel by Fishman (A Replacement Life) centers on a Jewish immigrant couple, Ukrainian-born Maya Rubin and Belarusian-born Alex Rubin, who live in northern New Jersey with their eight-year-old adopted son, Max. When Max (an "unquestionable goy") begins acting erratically-disappearing after school, chewing grass, befriending deer-Maya determines that his strange behavior has somehow to do with his being adopted-which Max doesn't know. With the intention of finding his birth parents (not since the young Maya and Alex first drove Max to New Jersey eight years before, betraying the closed nature of the adoption, have Maya and Alex heard from his parents), and showing Max where he came from, the Rubins set out for Montana, the state where Max was born. As the family, who rarely travel outside of New Jersey, make their way westward, encountering the eccentricities of American culture along the way, the spotlight focuses on Maya, who is overpowered by feelings of parental insecurity and restlessness. After a slow start, the novel, which seems at first like a road trip story, transforms into a sensitive and surprisingly adventurous exploration of one woman's wonder and suffering. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The parents of an eccentric adopted child head west to explore his roots and learn a few things about their own. Maya and Alex are immigrants of Russian Jewish extraction with little comprehension of America outside their suburban New Jersey enclave, so they're not sure what to make of it when their preteen son, Max, acquires a taste for the outdoors. He scares mom and dad by briefly disappearing to explore a nearby stream, has a newfound expertise in varieties of grasses, and he's gotten frighteningly close to the fauna in the backyard. Perhaps his biological parents' native land, Montana, somehow lurks in his genes? It's a preposterous notion, but for a novelist with a sense of the absurd like Fishman (A Replacement Life, 2014, etc.), it's enough to hang a novel on, and he has plenty of insights on how blurrily parents often perceive the nature-versus-nurture divide. Eager to look for the roots of Max's behavior, Maya thinks back to her own past (as an aspiring restaurateur who married to stay in the United States) as well as her scraps of memory of Max's biological parents, a hotel-clerk mom and battered rodeo-performer dad (hence the title). Fishman entertainingly satirizes a host of types (a folk healer, a dotty psychologist, a weary adoption-agency staffer, starchy old-world in-laws), but he's sincere when it comes to Maya, who's at the center of a plot twist that gives the closing chapters their gravitas. This feels almost like a magic trick given some of the narrative creakiness: Fishman sometimes overwrites scenes, Max and Alex don't claim much of the stage, a love-story detour feels untenable, and Montana is overplayed as a punch line. ("It can't be more beautiful than New Jersey," says Maya.) But Fishman smartly observes that the assimilation novel and road-trip novel make good partners. Both, after all, are about finding freedom. A comic novel about parenting infused with emotional intelligence. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The title of Fishman's second book (after The Replacement Life, 2014) is the only demand the birth mother makes when she delivers Maya and Alex Rubin's adoptive son. Eight years later, Max Rubin communes with deer in their suburban New Jersey backyard, then runs away from home to float face-down in streams. Determined that the answers to Max's odd behavior lie in Montana, where he was born, Maya begs Alex to drive them the thousands of miles, even as winter approaches. Overall, this is Maya's story. She and Alex are both immigrants from the former Soviet Union, but Alex, who came to the U.S. as a child with his parents, who set up the food-distribution center where he now works, does not struggle the way Maya who came as a college student and stayed once she fell in love does. At times, the narrative is slow and uncommunicative, it is a reflection of Maya's journey, and it does pick up in the end. Readers will be left thinking about belonging and family, and how varied the experience is for those born elsewhere.--Maguire, Susan Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"DON'T LET MY BABY DO RODEO," the second novel by the tender, dolorous, sharp and funny writer Boris Fishman, is the story of an adopted child and an adopted country; it is a tale of what it means to be foreign. Like "A Replacement Life," Fishman's first novel, the book is peopled by characters so eccentric they feel like family. He has the rare gift of startling us with a foreign culture and simultaneously making it feel like home. The Russian-speaking Jewish refugees in his novels, the generation that came to the United States just before and just after the fall of the Soviet Union, have lost the Old Country twice, yet they are never quite free of it. The novel begins with the disappearance of 8-year-old Max Rubin. He is discovered miles from his New Jersey home sitting calmly with his face in a river, counting pebbles. His frantic parents, Maya and Alex, have noticed inexplicable behavior before - the boy insists on sleeping on the floor; deer and hornets gather peacefully around him; he eats grass. This is not the behavior of a nice ex-Soviet Jewish boy, and the novel follows the Rubins' attempts to discover why their adopted son resembles a woodland creature. His Belarussian grandparents shake their heads. They have come to love the little blond boy they once considered a sign of failure (back home "everyone was fertile"), but they worry still about his foreign, which is to say gentile American, ancestry. Alex and his parents, Eugene and Raisa, "had wanted children and grandchildren with the same mindless hunger with which they sat down to meals." Insular and interested only in family, the Rubins initially greet the idea of an adoption as taking on "a used human being." But exactly because they are insular and interested only in family, they soon come around: "The boy was unique - because the Rubins were unique, because they had crossed an ocean and set themselves up from zero on a new shore." What they won't do is tell Max he is adopted. When Alex was 8, the elder Rubins left Minsk for New Jersey, where he was lovingly fed and petted, growing soft and stocky "as if life had padded him against misfortune." Alex's anxious, cynical, doting parents are a great pleasure for the reader; less so for their daughter-in-law. Maya came to the United States for college, and she misses the sociability of her gossipy, sociable, thousand-unit apartment building where the "low ceiling" of the Soviet economy always left time for visiting. Her new family, in contrast, is a self-sufficient island, Eugene and Raisa living just a few houses away. The Rubins flourish importing jam and honey from the Old Country, obsessed with work like proper Americans, locked in the "embrace of Profit, the eternally undersexed mistress." Fishman's appreciation of superstition, New and Old World, is subtle, comic and irresistible. The Rubins must navigate New Jersey as well as a thousand superstitions from back home: It's bad luck to whistle inside, to shake hands across the threshold, to count money that hasn't come in yet. The family "lived in expectation of danger and setback, even walked accordingly, a slight stoop in deference to the ax that would swing." They complain. They are content. It is more difficult for Maya. During her years in college, before her marriage, she remembers herself constantly asking the names of things: "This bird, that type of arch, those curlicues on the railing. ... The prospect of filling these vacancies was ravenously satisfying." Her life with the Rubins, the morbidly generous Rubins, has smothered her curiosity and her own wildness; it has removed her, literally, from the Russian soil, "oily ... chocolate-black earth" she once pressed against her face on her uncle's farm. She is so bored in New Jersey at one point that she is reduced to researching "boredom" on the Internet. Maya's worry about Max leads to a new journey, a cross-country car trip in the hope of tracing their son's biological parents and the origins of his peculiar behavior. It is a journey of foreigners into yet another foreign land. She and Alex are afraid of this exotic place called Montana, where Max was born. They are afraid of blizzards, snakes, bad American coffee. But it is only when Maya's fear of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing - of being foreign - becomes excruciatingly intense that she is finally able to understand the real reason she needed to drive west: She wants to stop being afraid; she wants "to give Max the gift of native feeling." Maya knows the "constant sensation of slight poisoning, of living in error" that comes with its loss. Maya wants to give her son the gift of truth, of calling things by the right words, including "adoption." "Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo" is a novel about finding the right words for what was once foreign but is no longer. It is suffused with sadness as well as humor, with hope as well as weary despair, and Fishman describes the turmoil of family, parenthood and cultural emotion with urgent, sly detachment. His language has the originality and imagination of someone who comes to English with unexpected thoughts and rhythms in his head, and he is, simply, a joy to read. The cosseted wife in this story is so bored at one point, she researches 'boredom' online. CATHLEEN SCHINE'S new novel, "They May Not Mean To, but They Do," will come out in June.
Library Journal Review
Maya and Alex Rubin's eight-year-old adopted son, Max, has been acting out in odd ways: sleeping on the floor, disappearing after school to count pebbles in a river, communing with deer. Searching for an explanation, the Rubins try a psychologist, a gypsy healer, and finally a road trip to Max's birthplace in Montana. But is Max's behavior really the problem, or is it the growing distance between Maya and Alex? Fishman (A Replacement Life) has written a novel largely about culture clash. Maya and Alex are immigrants, Maya from Ukraine and Alex from Belarus, and they both have a measure of discomfort with American culture. Maya is also something of an alien in her own family, which includes Alex's overbearing parents. Finally, there is the question of Max's Western roots clashing with the eastern New Jersey Jewish Rubins. -verdict The novel is somewhat frustrating, as little in Max's behavior appears to warrant the level of anxiety it provokes in his parents, and their reaction seems to cause more damage. Yet the book is more honest than most regarding the range of doubts and fears experienced by an adoptive family. The ending offers some hope of the family's healing, however tenuous. [See Prepub Alert, 9/14/15.]-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.