Too brief by far, but with enough sparks to give an idea of the author’s irreverent revelations. Overall, a fresh voice, and...
Shades of the absurd, Orthodox Jewish style, in a nutty little debut collection of 14 stories.
An 18-year-old Lubavitcher yeshiva student wakes up one morning in the form of a “very large goy” and terrorizes the community of bickering rabbis in “The Metamorphosis.” In “God Is a Big Happy Chicken,” newly dead Yankel Morgenstern ascends to heaven to discover that God is—surprise!—Chicken himself, “who gets his feed filled in the morning, and his droppings cleaned in the afternoon and that’s all He really wants to know.” And though Yankel is allowed to return to tell what’s what to his devoted family, still praying to a non-fowl deity, he can’t bring himself to disabuse them of their cherished ideals. In “Bobo the Self-Hating Chimp,” a small male chimpanzee in the Bronx Zoo achieves “total conscious self-awareness” one day when he recognizes that he feels shame—thanks to a “bright red erection”—and has a kind of breakdown that leads him to reject his previous monkey existence as meaningless and embrace suicide. In his theatrically deadpan moments, humor writer Auslander revisits Beckett, most notably, while a fear-and-loathing urban sensibility à la Woody Allen also springs to mind, along with Kafka, in these grim, seemingly silly pieces that possess a direct comic hit. “Holocaust Tips for Kids” is a marvelously twisted catalogue of grisly historical facts mixed with juvenile naïveté and fear: “Anne Frank hid in her attic for over two years. / Maybe I should pack more food.” Many of the stories skewer in some fashion what may be more contentious and solipsistic aspects of Judaism. In the last tale, for example, “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Supremey,” a balding junior accountant, Epstein, creates two slavish golem from the Kabbalah for Dummies only to watch them kill each other over finer points of law.
Too brief by far, but with enough sparks to give an idea of the author’s irreverent revelations. Overall, a fresh voice, and wonderfully fearless.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6456-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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