Tough to stomach.
Mom’s dead. Time, for a family of cannibals, to eat.
Auslander has always written like he’s courting a strike from a lightning bolt: His 2007 memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, was a hilarious recollection of his efforts to wriggle out from under his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, and his excellent 2012 novel, Hope: A Tragedy, dared some unkind words about Anne Frank’s legacy. Here, he pushes the envelope in labored and often tasteless fashion to satirize identity politics in general and religious ceremonies in particular. Its hero is Seventh Seltzer, one of 12 surviving siblings attending to the death of their mother. The Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans—not savages eager to feast on human flesh but people of faith who ritually consume family members after they die to preserve their heritage. (The Seltzer origin story involves an escape from the old country and efforts to escape the anti-Semitic wiles of Henry Ford; the Seltzer brothers were given the names First through Twelfth to make them memorable. A daughter is named Zero, because religious misogyny.) If you understand Auslander’s work as the dirtbag cousin of Portnoy’s Complaint, you can see the comic potential here: There’s a Borscht Belt–y therapist (“I’ve had many patients consumed with their mothers, but I’ve never had a patient who actually wanted to consume her”), bleak nursery rhymes to underscore the rituals, odd bits of folklore (Jack Nicholson is a huge disappointment for not using his bully pulpit to support his “Can-Am” brethren). But the prevailing mood is so embittered that the satire is hard to enjoy much; Seventh is a book editor lamenting the mass of “Not-So-Great Something-American Novels,” and this reads like an effort to burn the genre of identity-focused fiction to the ground. But replace it with what? Sarcastic fiction about squabbling siblings and parental viscera larded with sour jokes about assimilation?
Tough to stomach.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59463-372-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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