Review by New York Times Review
SHALOM AUSLANDER is my kind of Jew - an unapologetically paranoid, guilt-ridden, self-loathing Diaspora kvetch, enraged by a God he can't live with or without. While others of his generation may mine the tradition for a fond retrieval of forgotten lore, Auslander throws stones at the fiddler on the roof. He's a black comic who's alloyed the manic existential shtick of Lenny Bruce with the gallows humor that's been a staple of the repertoire since the Babylonian Exile. In his two previous books, "Beware of God," a collection of wickedly funny if not just plain wicked stories, and "Foreskin's Lament," a memoir that torched the bridges to his strict Orthodox heritage, he's been relentlessly indicting the Hebrew God as a poor role model. In the process he's made himself both celebrated and notorious: he is patently not good for the Jews. In his new book, "Hope: A Tragedy," he has abandoned memoir in favor of the novel, because, as the real estate agent who has the last word of consequence in a book obsessed with last words says, "Nonfiction is too damned much to bear." Perhaps. But Auslander's novel embodies its own kind of unbearability: unbearable hilarity alternating with, at times, unbearable pain. Joyce's Stephen Dedalus said history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Solomon Kugel, the beleaguered hero of "Hope," is just trying to get a decent night's sleep. ("It's a tough place to get some sleep," Kugel says. "Earth, that is.") Wanting to spirit his family from the depredations of the contemporary world to a place "unburdened by the past, unencumbered by history," Kugel has relocated them from the city to an old farmhouse in upstate New York. But Kugel's household, what with a sickly child, a troubled wife and a moribund mother suffering from a concentration camp experience she never had, are unlikely candidates for the bucolic life. Further disturbing their tranquillity is an arsonist at large who's burning farmhouses. And if that weren't enough, dayenu, Kugel has discovered in his attic, alive though far from well, who else? Anne Frank. True, Auslander is hardly the first to make literary hay out of everyone's favorite martyr. From Meyer Levin to Philip Roth, writers have resurrected St. Anne for their fictive ends. But Auslander's version has little in common with the innocent whose precocity was nipped in the bud by history's premier nightmare. His Anne, a grotesquely aged and prickly survivor who has hidden from life since the war, is calculated to outrage all those for whom the doe-eyed diarist is sacred. Albeit a less than subtle metaphor for the burden of history, she is unequivocally - as Kafka, who haunts this book, said of himself - a memory come alive, a savage memory who feeds on carrion and stinks from necrosis. In the tradition of unwanted things in the attic, from white elephants to Mr. Rochester's wife, Anne Frank is the most unwanted thing of all. For all his efforts to save himself and his family from a malign universe, Kugel never has a chance. In the absence of a vanished father, he was raised by a mother who, bedeviled by her imaginary past, lives out of suitcases and wakes up screaming each morning. She claims that the lampshade she places beside the bed of her young son is his grandfather: "'This is Zeide?' he asked. . . . "'You see what they do to us?' she said. 'There's no peace, no peace. Wherever we go, wherever we hide. Terror and more terror and more terror.'" "'It says Made in Taiwan,' Kugel said." No wonder Kugel suffers from a terminal anhedonia, which we've learned from Woody Allen is an inability to enjoy, well, anything. In his desperation Kugel seeks relief from Professor Jove, his own inverse Dr. Pangloss, who designates optimism the enemy. He declares that "the greatest source of misery in the world . . . was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope." "I just want my family to be safe," Kugel says. "I just want the world to leave us alone." Fat chance. Forced to choose between the care of his family and the elder-care of his uninvited tenant, Kugel opts for both, and that way lies the madness that upends his life. "It was as if the cosmos had flipped, or perhaps we'd simply had it all wrong all along, the rapture of heaven below, the agony of hell above," Kugel thinks, regarding the view from the attic. Once the discovery of the undead Anne is made, the action becomes frenetic, as Kugel blunders like a hagridden Basil Fawlty from humiliation to disgrace. Here the reader might succumb to whiplash from the pace of the narrative were not Auslander such a master of comic timing. Like the black humorists of the '60s with whom he invites comparison - Vonnegut and Heller especially, though to my mind less the Heller of "Catch-22" than the one of "Something Happened," in which the protagonist literally loves his child to death - Auslander knows when he's stretched logic to the breaking point. Then he loosens the thumbscrews and the narrative snaps back to a domestic clarity wherein Kugel is not so much a febrile sensibility as a fragile human being. A good man, in fact, capable of comforting a dying fawn and even offering tenderness to the wreckage of Anne Frank, when he's not contemplating her murder. "To obsess about death is cowardice," Anne remarks, "to run from death is to run from life." "She said from her attic," Kugel replies. But he's also capable of disengaging truth from irony, just as Auslander, despite all his antic heresies, is out to reconcile hope and fate. It's a doomed enterprise, of course, a fool's errand, but how else, he asks, should one behave in a fallen world? Kafka again: there is an infinite amount of hope in the world, but not for us. A paradox Kugel defies at his own peril. A virtuoso humorist, and a brave one: beware Shalom Auslander; he will make you laugh until your heart breaks. A man seeking peace moves his family to rural New York. Then he discovers Anne Frank in the attic. Steve Stern is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Frozen Rabbi."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 15, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Given his audaciously funny memoir, Foreskin's Lament (2007), it isn't surprising that Auslander's first novel is defiantly hilarious, but its riotous and downright sacrilegious satire wildly exceeds expectations. Solomon Kugel has moved his family out of the city and into an old upstate farmhouse. All should be idyllic, but Kugel's mother has delusions of being a Holocaust survivor, and the house is plagued with a terrible smell. Once Kugel, a champion worrier, whose psychoanalyst tells him that hope is a malady, discovers that a veritable Holocaust saint is living in his attic, life becomes antic and impossibly complicated. As his hapless hero tries to do right, Auslander orchestrates a mission of desecration. Spouting painfully nervy puns ( Auschwitz happens ) and cracking bad jokes about gluten intolerance and how he wouldn't even have made it to head shaving in the camps, Kugel mocks the Misery Olympics of Jewish laments and demolishes the entire concept of remembrance. Along with its lacerating irreverence and tonic comedy of angst, Auslander's devilishly cunning, sure-to-be controversial novel poses profound questions about meaning, justice, truth, and responsibility.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cultural anthropologists trying to figure out if there really is a recognizably Jewish voice and sense of humor, and if so, how it mixes and matches its key elements of self-deprecation, mordant compliance, hypochondria, and a total lack of surprise when disaster occurs, should consider Auslander's debut novel. The author's memoir, Foreskin's Lament, was about growing up in and leaving the Orthodox Jewish community; this novel's hero, Solomon Kugel, isn't observant, but he's still locked into a relationship with a God he "could never believe in... but he could never not believe in, either." And with a mother who insists she's a Holocaust survivor, major money problems, a farmhouse that's not only on the hit list of a local arsonist but also features an unwanted occupant in the attic, he's fully immersed in what Philip Roth (an obvious influence, down to a shared obsession with Anne Frank) once called "the incredible drama of being a Jew." Things start out hilarious and if the book wanes a bit as life keeps getting worse for Kugel, God's plaything, that's okay. As funny as it is, the novel is also a philosophical treatise, a response-ambivalent, irreverent, and almost certainly offensive to some-to the question of whether art and life are possible after the Holocaust, an examination of how to "never forget" without, as Kugel's infamous attic occupant puts it, "never shutting up about it." (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Nebbish Solomon Kugel finds a cranky Anne Frank still alive in his attic and finally declares, "Six million he kills, and this one gets away." "Poisonously funny" (Entertainment Weekly). (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
--he just knows that a book has to be very good to pull it off. The story's hero is Solomon Kugel, an eco-friendlygoods salesman who's moved his wife and toddler son to a rural Northeast town for some peace and quiet. No such luck: An arsonist is at large, the tenant they've taken on to help make ends meet won't stop complaining and Kugel's mother, supposedly at death's door with a terminal illness, isn't going anywhere. Indeed, she eagerly pursues her beloved hobby of imagining herself a Holocaust victim, slipping images of the death camps alongside family photos in scrapbooks. Investigating a tapping sound he hears in the ducts, Solomon discovers an elderly, sickly, foul-mouthed Anne Frank living in his attic, working on a sequel to her famous diary. The metaphor is punishingly obvious: The Holocaust is an unshakable, guilt-inducing fixture in the life of any self-aware Jew, and living with its legacy can be a burden. What's remarkable is how far Auslander (Beware of God, 2005, etc.) is willing to push the metaphor, and how much pathos he gets from the comedy. Lampshades, grim historical photographs and Alan Dershowitz are all the stuff of laugh-out-loud lines, and Solomon's therapist delivers statements that turn received wisdom on its head--utopia is dystopia, hope is tragic. Auslander's pithy, fast-moving prose emphasizes the comedy, but no attentive reader will misunderstand that he's respectful of the Holocaust's tragedy, only struggling to figure out how to live in its shadow. Brutal, irreverent and very funny. An honest-to-goodness heir to Portnoy's Complaint.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
