The Evil Inclination
Daniel Victor
North Street Book Prize 2023 (view all the winners)
Grand Prize, Literary Fiction
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Daniel Victor's The Evil Inclination is a sensitive, tragic love story between a modern-day Romeo and Juliet who transgress religious boundaries. It's a brilliant novel that works on many levels—theological, personal, cultural—with high stakes and sharply observed humorous moments that make the characters achingly real.
As students at Brooklyn College in 2003, Lev Livitski, a dutiful son from a devout Orthodox Jewish family in Flatbush, and Angela Pizzato, a brash and alluring Italian Catholic from Bensonhurst, are struck with an unlikely and overwhelming passion for each other. Fearing that both families would be horrified, the lovers carry on an affair whose secrecy intensifies their lust but strains their relationship. We follow the rocky romance through Lev's third-person-close perspective, getting flashes of Angela's subjectivity and psychological depths that the reader sees more clearly than the self-absorbed young man does.
In Lev's world, you're either on or off the derech, the path of righteous Jewish observance. There's no à la carte option. Compelled almost against his will (or so he tells himself) to lie to his family and indulge in forbidden flesh, Lev wonders when "the evil inclination" first found a breach to enter his heart. He thinks it might have been that Shabbos morning, shortly before meeting Angela, when he simply didn't want to attend synagogue.
"What?" his mother shouted. "You don't feel like going? You don't feel like going? Since when has being Jewish had anything to do with how you feel?"
A funny scene, but one that, like much great comedy, skates precariously over a frozen lake of existential angst. For Lev, it cracks. Is it possible that his whole life, his community's way of life, is rote observance and meaningless self-deprivation?
Ironically, Angela is on a spiritual trajectory in the other direction. Like John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever, she is groping toward something finer than her crass and sexually predatory milieu. Lev's religion is part of the attraction for her, just as her worldliness appeals to him. She drives him crazy with factoids from Rabbi Dr. Erwon Arkadi's How Strange the Jews!, a book she got from a Jamaican guy on a street corner. As Angela is falling in love with Jewish observance, Lev is souring on it.
Why aren't they able to meet in the middle? As I interpreted it, it had a lot to do with Lev's self-disgust for falling off the derech and his resulting contempt for Angela. The Evil Inclination is like a heterosexual remix of Giovanni's Room, complete with a squalid love nest in Red Hook whose disarray symbolizes the impossibility of bringing their relationship "out of the closet" and into the world of wholesome families.
And yet, Angela's rowdy, dysfunctional Italian family eventually accepts her conversion and marriage to a different Orthodox man, a Rabbi no less, adding to Lev's bitterness that once again he's made an unnecessary sacrifice. Is she happy in her new incarnation as a dowdy rebbetzin? The novel wisely leaves this ambiguous. She reminded me of Sandy, the queer-coded schoolgirl turned cloistered nun, from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Both immure themselves in high-demand religions in response to a passionate relationship with someone self-centered, but fail to be completely at peace.
I can tell that a book is prizeworthy when I keep ruminating about it after the last page is turned, noticing new layers of allusions, and in this case, hoping and failing to find a way that it could have ended differently. First-round judge Anne Mydla said, "I can't recall any other book this year that gave such an intense moment-to-moment sensation of irrevocable decisions being made. In that respect it's like reading Tolstoy, maybe also because it follows the narrative pattern in which protagonists’ experiences of disappointment cause them to become more morally serious, so serious even that they are then forced out of the belief system that they learned morals from in the first place."
The book cover was excellent, very literary and modern in style, with a silhouette of an Orthodox man in a flapping prayer shawl recoiling melodramatically from a sexy woman's outstretched hand. It captured the "don't threaten me with a good time" ambiguity of Lev's faux-resistance to his treyf temptress. The interior print was laid out well with an attractive large font and no obvious typos. Design is a strength we observed in the Atmosphere Press entries this year, though some had more internal errors than this book did. (Disclosure: Atmosphere Press advertises with Winning Writers, but we do our best to keep such relationships from influencing the judges.)
Intelligent, entertaining, and theologically substantial, The Evil Inclination is a book I'll be thinking about for a long time.
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