1. Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church, 2 vols. (London, 1863–1865), p. 518Google Scholar; cited in Carpenter, Mary Wilson, George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and Protestant Apocalyptic History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 212.Google Scholar

2. Carpenter (George Eliot) shows that Eliot had a mastery of Protestant hermeneutics and knowledge of the apocalyptic tradition, especially the Book of Daniel and Revelations. These hermeneutics and tradition are carefully plotted within the narratives which seemingly disregard the very lessons that these biblical and apocalyptic undercurrents would teach. Carpenter's argument is that in Eliot such clues and allusions, taken together, form their own commentary upon the action within the novel and the culture it represents. The premise of “many interpretations” that her novel with a hero named Daniel promotes is thus also embedded in its process of inner commentary.

3. The term translatio studii (or translatio imperil) refers to a concept fundamental to American typology, which not only takes impetus from Isaiah's prophecies, but reads the apocalyptic schemes of the Four Empires of Revelations and the Book of Daniel as predicting an inevitable course of history. That historic pattern moves westward as a “course of empire” leading to America as the “kingdom of the latter days” (see Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America [New York: Routledge, 1993], pp. 147–67)Google Scholar. The important relationship of the Book of Daniel to American foundations, especially to its early political movements, is thoroughly presented in a J. F. Maclear essay whose title is explanatory: “New England and the Fifth Monarchy: The Quest for the Millenium in Early American Puritanism” (William and Mary Quarterly 32 [1975]: 223–60).Google Scholar

4. An ideology of history thus is implicit in such terms as “new” and “West” — and may, by implication, be heard even in “California.” I have commented elsewhere upon another modern Daniel who surfaces in California: Doctorow, E. L.'s The Book of Daniel (New York: Signet, 1971)Google Scholar also tests the dream on its Western American limits in a scene near the end, set in Disneyland's “Autopia.”

5. Dan. 12:4.

6. At this writing Faye Kellerman has published three other novels. The Quality of Mercy, set in Shakespearean England, is not part of this American detective series. While her 1992 novel, False Prophet (New York: William Morrow), does continue as another mystery novel set in California, its focus veers away from an interpretive figure's trials and toward what might be said to resemble the “Gwendolen Harleth part” of the Deronda world. Using broad satiric outlines, this novel does not develop the critique I have previously found intriguing. Her 1993 novel, Grievous Sin (New York: William Morrow), indeed abandons the controlled double-world settings that this reader finds challenging in her earlier mysteries. I make occasional reference to these most recent novels, but I do not include them among the first four detective works I here consider (see notes 27, 37, and 40).

7. After he is discovered to be Jewish, Decker chooses the name Akiva (S&P, p. 301)Google Scholar, a name that his own mother later uses (DA, p. 428)Google Scholar; but that is not his birth name.

8. An interesting reversal here may be noted. When Daniel Deronda tells his mother, “I have thought of you more than of any other being in the world,” his mother replies by speaking of herself and her perspectives. (DD, p. 687)Google Scholar; but when Decker's mother hears that he knows about her presence, it is she who moans, “I never stopped thinking about him. Never” (DA, p. 56)Google Scholar. Is Kellerman's need to provide the authentic Jewish mother's response the source of this signal difference from Eliot?

9. Cynthia Chase argues that histories, or any narratives, can only signify “an acknowledgement of their constitutionally fictional status and … the limited possibilities of language” (“The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda,” PMLA 93 [1978]: 215–27, quote on p. 223)Google Scholar; she punningly uses the fact of circumcision itself as only one of a series of the text's fictionally signifying pointers (p. 225).

10. Culler, Jonathan's overview of narratology's insights is helpful (“Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative,” Poetics Today 1 [1980]: 27–37)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Dennis Porter calls detective fiction the “genre committed to an act of recovery, moving forward in order to move back” (“Backward Construction and the Art of Suspense,” in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. Most, Glenn V. and Stowe, William W. [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983], pp. 327–40Google Scholar; quote on p. 329). Umberto Eco describes a Fleming novel as a “game of football in which we know beforehand the place, the numbers and personalities of the players, the rules of the game, … except … we do not know until the very end who will win”; or better still, like a “game of basketball played by the Harlem Globetrotters against a local team … the pleasure lies in watching the trained virtuosity with which they defer the final moment” (“Narrative Structures in Fleming,” in Most, and Stowe, , Poetics of Murder, pp. 94–117; quotes on p. 113).Google Scholar

11. Puritan minister Thomas Shepard in his journal speaks of “God's main plot” and “God's deep plot” (pp. 119, 141). Note the beginning of editor Michael McGiffert's title for his study of this journal: God's Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety — Being the Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972).Google Scholar

12. Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 135, 169.Google Scholar

13. Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 46Google Scholar. See Bercovitch, , Puritan OriginsGoogle Scholar, ch. 1, for his fullest explication of these ideas.

14. Bercovitch, , Rites of Assent, pp. 86–87Google Scholar. This is the subject of Bercovitch, 's book-length study, The Office of the Scarlet Letter (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

15. Describing a “flattened” imaginary construct of an American national myth that effaces diversity in the name of continuities, recent critics of national culture would rehistoricize “America” in a strategy that promotes versions foregrounding the specificities of ethnicity, class, and gender that have been erased (see Kolodny, Annette, “Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers,” American Literature 64 [1992]: 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; esp. pp. 2–3, 13). Peter Carafiol, however, in arguing that critics of American culture should ignore such “American” concepts entirely, may fall into flattening perspectives once again. For his own sense of a neutral view would override those resistant specificities that must in many cases include concepts of destiny in their beliefs, or reactions to them (“Commentary: After American Literature,” American Literary History 4 [1992]: 539–49).Google Scholar

16. The biblical Book of Daniel is a polyglot text, broken into Aramaic and Hebrew parts; the writing on the wall, furthermore, is to be read by Daniel in a kind of transliteration. In the Apocryphal story of Susannah and the Elders, itself a separate Daniel text, the riddle of Susannah is solved by Daniel's recognizing incongruent versions. Most useful for the Puritans was Daniel's example (in both Daniel texts) as one who does not accept the governing versions, thus is an outsider to the court — another two-world system — a feature that is emphasized both in the opening prison scenes and later in the lions' den trial that results from his refusal to worship local idols.

17. The rape of the landscape, in the often-used sense of this term, is also integral to Kellerman's novel — since development projects threaten to lay waste these open fields. But the Emersonian settings repeated in Kellerman's novels are stylized, as if to thematize their cultural importance; they emphasize the tendency toward a stylization of Emerson itself in American culture. Stylized Emersonian settings would serve, furthermore, to place this detective novel in line with others by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald. These mystery writers, too, evoke exaggeratedly Emersonian or Whitmanesque settings, I would argue, if only to show how such romanticizations in America can conceal terrible crimes in its midst. (Chandler, 's wartime idyll, The Lady in the Lake, is an excellent example.)Google Scholar

18. Peter K. Garrett speaks of a “double or multiple” plot system in Victorian novels as one that works in opposition to any simple outlook, in an underlying dialogue between “irreducibly different structural principles that prevent them from resolving into any single stable order or meaning” (The Victorian Multiplot Novel: Studies in Dialogical Form [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980], pp. 9–10)Google Scholar. See also readings of this novel or Eliot in general by Chase (“Decomposition of the Elephants”), Carpenter (George Eliot), Wilt, (“He would come back”)Google Scholar, and Gilbert, Sandra (“Life's Empty Pack: Notes Toward a Literary Daughteronomy,” Critical Inquiry 11 [1985]: 355–84).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Wilt forcefully argues for an “unverifiable” reading as a “psychohistory of a fictional person,” Gwendolen Grandcourt. Finding suggestive patterns and slips of the tongue, Wilt notes troubling hints of incest and sexual abuse within Daniel Deronda. These may, in fact, be akin to the “grievous sin” at the heart of Kellerman's most recent novel, with medical and institutional malpractice now bear ing the brunt of Kellerman's previous novels' more challenging social and cultural insights.

20. In fact Faye Kellerman's first novel appeared in 1986, before Wilt's 1987 essay. With the vagaries of publication delays, one can only be amazed, and in my case delighted, by the almost exact timely propinquity of their writing — on the two coasts, East and West, of America.

21. Bercovitch, , Office of the Scarlet Letter, pp. 40–42.Google Scholar

22. Harold Fisch has offered an elegant reading not only of the two-court systems of the megillah, but of the styles of representation within them, as expressive of its unspoken argument. He contrasts the language of a lavish Persian setting (citing Firdausi's Shah-Nama epic) with the “Hebrew counterplot” presented in biblical parallelism, and says that between them is the space or silence that lurks behind the whole megillah: the name and plot never mentioned are God's (“Esther: Two Tales of One City,” in Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], pp. 8–15; esp. 9, 13)Google Scholar. “God's plot” in Puritan American terms, similarly, would keep open that same space for its everlasting tensions.

23. Andre Lacocque uses this term with regard to Esther, Megillat (The Feminine Unconventional: Four Subversive Figures in Israel's Tradition [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990], pp. 80ff)Google Scholar and other texts to emphasize the tensions within such stories. The letters sent, at the end of this scroll, further reinforce such multiplicity; and the very method of the enfolding of many stories is implicit in the text's (un)scrolling physical format. In an unpublished paper, “The Representation of Writing in Esther” (1993), Hindy Najman explores the many ways that “the role of writing is central to Esther” and suggests indeed that the letters written at the end are this story, with its inbuilt multiplicities that include the possibilities of both Mordecai's and Esther's authorship (see verse 9:29). Adin Steinsaltz points out a further complexity, saying that Esther is an “astonishing instance of a miracle that has no supernatural element whatsoever … [nor any] mysterious happenings over and above the events which themselves change the situation.” (Biblical Images: Men and Women of the Book, trans. Hanegbi, Yehuda and Keshet, Yehudit [New York: Harper Collins, 1984], p. 215).Google Scholar

24. Crosby, Christina, in The Ends of History: Victorians and “The Woman Question” (New York: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar, argues that Eliot “consistently misreads the many Hebrew texts she studied” when she forces Jewish history to “assimilate to an idealist system actually inimical” to it (p. 35). Eliot is thus “fetishizing” history and the Jews (p. 41), so that despite herself Eliot “ends up denying Jewish specificity” in favor of “idealizing premises” (p. 31). See also Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar on Eliot's complex placement of herself within historical traditions (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], ch. 6).Google Scholar

25. Pardes, Ilana, in Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, reads the Book of Ruth as a “reinterpretation of the history of the founding mothers of Israel,” and convincingly shows how it demonstrates by contrast what is missing elsewhere in the Bible. “The limitations of feminine perspectives elsewhere in biblical narrative are flaunted and challenged,” she says – making the point that is precisely appropriate for Eliot's introduction of hints of Ruth at this moment in Daniel's (and Gwendolen's) narrative. Pardes points out that Ruth is “doubly other – both a foreigner and a woman” (p. 99).

26. Garrett sees Daniel entering a “dream” – appropriately enough for this essay; Gwendolen is the one, he argues, who is able to face the world supplied with the complex messages that she has learned (Victorian Multiplot Novel, p. 178)Google Scholar. The recent controversy aired within the letters in back pages of PMLA evince the ongoing tensions in American critical thinking concerning history's complex formulation. In specific terms, it seems that Crosby's comments, in The Ends of History, about misreading Jewish history and texts so as to force upon them an “idealist system actually inimical” to it is relevant in this case as well. Evocations of Daniel, in both Eliot and Kellerman, suggest an awareness of the endless cataclysms inherent within such idealizing overviews, and both writers, in my reading, are warning against the male monolithic politics that are heaped now upon Daniel Deronda.

27. It is interesting here to note that the Puritans themselves referred to their testing and wrestling in America, specifically using the examples, as Bercovitch has shown, of “Samson amidst the Philistines, Daniel in the lion's den,…” (Rites of Assent, p. 112)Google Scholar. There are hints of the philistines in both Deronda and The Ritual Bath: Gwendolen says of Daniel that he was not one of those “ridiculous and dowdy Philistines” (DD, p. 40)Google Scholar, and Schulman says to Decker that his in-laws are not “complete and utter philistines” (RB, p. 229)Google Scholar. In False Prophet, the scene is set within just that world often equated with false values and false gods in the Arnoldian sense of the uncultivated; indeed one falsely powerful figure is named Delilah (see Hardy, 's editorial note in Deronda, p. 886)Google Scholar. Branching away from Eliot's Deronda further into philistine settings, Kellerman's more recent search for a female interpreter in her last two novels (despite the Delilah, or even the Sarah, implications) is not promising. (Also see notes 6, 37, and 40)

28. I must here register my disavowal of another device in Kellerman's books, one that links the Viet Nam experiences of Decker to the Holocaust survival of Schulman. The parallels between Schulman and Decker are drawn both by the direct juxtapositions of scenes, and by the content of stories that Rina, and Schulman himself, tell. If it is Kellerman's agenda to historicize Decker's memory, and by implication the American (Daniel) dream, her homogenizing of Viet Nam and Holocaust only undercuts her historicism. The differences between these two monumental and memorable occurrences are real; they should be noted, not blended, in our memory. My dispute with a conflation of Viet Nam and Holocaust history provides the topic of another project underway.

29. Specifically Rabbi Akiva was quoting the biblical passage, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18), as a basis for all religious practices and beliefs.

30. In Silas Marner, it is the daughter Eppie who chooses to stay with the adoptive father. But the underlying patterns are very similar, including a lost child whose life requires a decision to acknowledge a history of personal devotion. For a harsher reading of Eppie's choice as one that is but an “empty pack” see Gilbert. Inheritance is a concept that appears often in American literature – both as theme and as a dynamics of self-definition (see Zanger, Jules, “‘Consider the Lilies of the Field’: The Inheritance Theme in American Literature,” Antioch Review 41 [1983]: 480–87)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Harold Fisch notes that several biblical echoes in Silas Marner taken together shape a pattern of individuals' decisive actions that become part of a heritage of redemptive history. I would add that these Eliot references, in fact, trace a feminine course of decisions that constitute an important biblical subtext as the route to such redemption (“Biblical Realism in Silas Marner,” in Identity and Ethos, ed. Gelber, Mark H. [New York: Peter Lang, 1986], pp. 343–60).Google Scholar

31. Linda Hutcheon has shown how one form of referential art that she calls parody in a broad sense both “legitimizes and subverts that which it parodies” (The Politics of Postmodernism [London: Routledge, 1989], p. 101).Google Scholar

32. Stanley Cavell, who has written extensively on the philosophical implications of reading Emerson, would perhaps agree that Decker's “finding” in such a mystery novel could be a national act of “founding” America (see, for example, Cavell, , “Finding as Founding,” in This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein [Albuquerque, N.M.: Living Batch Press, 1989])Google Scholar. Cavell's point is that turning toward one another's individual (truly self-reliant) stories is an act of averting monolithic plots that are forms of single-minded conformities. Such aversion includes a suspicion of using Emerson's own words about self-reliance as mere slogans, a suspicion which, interestingly enough, Kellerman's ironic idealizing citation might also evince. An underlying premise that would connect Cavell's philosophy and the historical insights of Bercovitch (and Emerson, as well as Faye Kellerman), then, would be a recognition of agonistic thinking as the saving American logic. Cavell describing aversive thinking as a “constant keeping in mind of one another” posits that such conversation “enacts in this way the state of democracy” (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], p. 138)Google Scholar, even as Kellerman's “you – I” confrontations would seem to do.

33. I take it that is why Leonora Charisi's song has gone sour. So too, in a broadly ironic way, does that of one “Eversong,” in False Prophet.

34. The information given at the back of her first novel says that Faye Kellerman is among other things, “a musician who plays four instruments [and] a guitar maker.”

35. Miller, Nancy K., “Philoctetes' Sister: Feminist Literary Criticism and the New Misogyny,” in Getting Personal (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1991), pp. 101–120; esp. p. 116.Google Scholar

36. Beer, Gillian, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 218.Google Scholar

37. In Kellerman's 1993 novel, Grievous Sin, Rina, upon hearing of her barrenness, discusses with Rav Schulman Sarah's “laughter of disbelief” about future births, miracles, or other kinds of (prophetic) fulfillments (p. 79). Despite such momentary implications, however, Kellerman's latest novel delves less into spiritual crises than into syndromes related to childbirth, endometriosis, miscarriage and hysterectomy. The Americanist challenges of the first four mystery novels seem now to recede further and further from focus, as hormones flood her scene – without symbolic honey.

38. The point is that not all recent Jewish and American mystery stories are culturally intertextual in fully suggestive ways. Harry Kemelman's mysteries are clearly not. Though deeply involved in and knowledgeable about both Jewish and American tradition and culture, including specific cases that focus upon a woman's view, their intrinsic textual/sexual politics stand, one could say, in diametric opposition to Kellerman's first four mysteries. In the only critical essay I have found that is devoted to Kellerman, “The Orthodox Detective Novels of Faye Kellerman,” Ellen Serlen Uffen makes a point that seems almost perfectly to suit Kemelman's (not Kellerman's) detective ideal – when she says that these mysteries work on both a religious and social plane to “restore order.” Uffen claims that Decker must “painstakingly disentangle [the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane] into careful order and then clarify his own relationship to both” (Studies in American Jewish Literature 11 [1992]: 195–203Google Scholar; quote on p. 196); but this is a position almost diametrically opposite to my reading of these four Kellerman novels' structures.

39. The figure of Daniel is not at all that of a confident interpreter or victorious prophet; repeatedly the Book of Daniel describes him, despite his successes, as one whose “spirit was troubled within me” Dan. 7:15), who is repeatedly “frightened,” “overcome,” “shaking,” and who “heard but could not understand” the outcome of the end (cf. Dan. 8:17, 12:8).

40. This is borne out in her latest novel, when it is not a wise Sarah figure, but young Cindy, Decker's all-too-cloned and street-smart daughter, who is poised for a takeover as Kellerman's incipient detective.