Floyd Skloot,
Writer
Book Buying Links:
The Open Door
Story Line Press, Paper, 1997, 214 pp
The Open Door, Floyd Skloot’s third novel, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and a selection of the Portland Oregonian Book Club.
It is the late 1930s when Myron Adler and Faye Raskin ‑ the most mismatched couple imaginable ‑ meet and marry. Myron owns a live poultry market in the Brooklyn Battery and Faye, the haughty and pretentious daughter of a well‑to‑do Manhattan jeweler, leads a fantasy life filled with high‑class suitors. Through the 40s and 50s, as the Adlers raise two sons, their difficulties erupt in troubling, sometimes violent ways. The Open Door, Floyd Skloot's powerful third novel, traces how Richard and Daniel Adler respond to a home environment of physical and emotional abuse and grow up to become radically different men. With candor and precision, Skloot captures the nuances of second‑generation Jewish immigrant life. He skillfully presents the pulse of mid‑century Brooklyn ‑ where the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Mad Bomber, Mafia heavies and two‑bit boxers populate a world the Adler brothers struggle to comprehend.
"It is a comic novel that is punctuated throughout by moments of considerable anguish... The plotting is lucid in The Open Door. It's language is so unpretentious, even when Skloot resorts to Brooklyn Jewish dialect, that it almost disappears; the reader becomes that immersed in the story . . . . The Open Door is a well‑crafted novel, a captivating and timely story worth telling with a message worth remembering."—Library Journal
"Everything in this novel has the true ring you'd expect in a memoir, but it has the artful arrangement of the novel. Skloot makes you laugh all the way to the places where he socks you... He's the kind of writer you give yourself over to for the duration. He knows how to make a world"—Sandra Scofield, The Oregonian
"Sheds necessary light on that long chain of humans doing harm to one another in the name of family. What emerges is a stinging and ultimately hopeful story, worthy of shelf space alongside Pat Conroy's The Great Santini."—Jo‑Ann Mapson
"A beautiful book, the stuff of literature"—Binnie Kirshenbaum
"Skloot's rich period piece is a reminder of more timeless truths."—Barb Scot
“A dazzling examination of a misguided marriage and its effect on two generations. His portrayal is painstaking, but ultimately, and thankfully, generous. The book nets you in the first paragraph, and hold you through the ending which is quiet and perfect.” —Karen Joy Fowler, judge, Oregon Book Award