RaveTikkunDarwin’s Ghosts benefits from Dorfman’s facility in navigating many worlds. The prose style of the linear contemporary novel is infused with the tradition of magic realism, if not in its language, in its storytelling. The binary form is apt; the extraordinary is grounded in the commonplace. This novel insists that we accept the events depicted as real. Our ethical lives depend upon it ... Darwin’s Ghosts is dizzying in the best ways. It is a presence. Open the book and the ghosts manifest. The immediate events of our lives parallel the events and concerns in the book. And vice-versa. This dynamic insists we engage in its profound inquiries and challenges to a way of life that in our innocence we have falsely valorized.
