THE JEWISH SON

A son confronts memories of his father.

You’d be forgiven for assuming Guebel’s latest book is a memoir. It certainly reads like one: The narrator, also named Daniel, recounts a traumatic childhood with parents who offered him neither acceptance, understanding, nor basic affection. “I saw in my parents’ eyes,” he writes, “not just premature disenchantment and irritation, but also, or so I believed, a desire to see me vanish by way of some catastrophic miracle.” There is no plot, per se, and Daniel—who, like his creator, eventually became an author—leads the reader from memory to memory in an order that is more stream of consciousness than chronological. At particular issue here is Daniel’s father, who, when Daniel was still a child, would beat him with a belt. Daniel says of his father’s spankings: “his was not a methodical ‘sweep’ of the totality but a partial intervention dictated by chance, at whose discretion the belt landed on new zones or applied itself entirely or partially to a zone already hit.” If, among all these details, the reader is reminded of Kafka’s Letter to His Father, that connection is more than once made explicit. Kafka’s Letter “is one of my favorite books,” Daniel tells us. “If I had to choose between rescuing this handbook of self-disparagement and reproach from a blazing fire, or Ulysses, I’d abandon Joyce’s pyrotechnic novel to the flames and burn my fingers to save the few pages written by the Czech Jew.” As these passages make clear, Guebel’s prose tends toward the florid or dense—put plainly, he overwrites. That’s a shame. There is much in this slim little book that is affecting, even brilliant, if Guebel would only get out of his own way.

Moving at times, the novel is marred by its author’s florid prose style.