Review by Booklist Review
Goldberg follows his delirious Stalin-era satire, The Yid (2016), with an equally caustic send-up of today's brand of authoritarianism. After being summarily fired by the Washington Post, science reporter Bill (actually Ilya) Katzenelenbogen heads to Hollywood, Florida, where an old friend, a megawealthy plastic surgeon billboard-advertised as the Butt God of Miami Beach, mysteriously plunged to his death. Bill intends to investigate but is immediately sidelined by the vicious power struggle among condo board members at the Château, the high-rise home of villainous Jewish-Russian émigrés, including his long-estranged fraudster father. Unaware that Bill, too, is Russian, the residents peg him as an FBI agent on the trail of their outrageous kickback scheme. Depressed, pickled in cheap vodka, and back under the thumb of his fearless, diabolically scheming father once a courageous dissident poet in their homeland, now an avid Trump supporter Bill bumbles from disaster to discovery. With allusions to Gogol, Miami Modern architect Morris Lapidus, and his own medical journalism, impishly comedic Goldberg peer to Tom Wolfe, Leslie Epstein, and Stanley Elkin cannily burlesques the toxicity of human folly under Trump and Putin.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Goldberg's second novel, after The Yid, is a salty, witty, tragic comedy that mocks Russian Jewish immigrants, Florida retirees, condo living, "Donal'd Tramp," elderly sex, old folks who scam the early bird dinner specials, and more. Bill Katzenelenbogen, a 52-year-old science writer, has just been fired from his reporter job at the Washington Post for insubordination. Broke and depressed, he is desperate to reclaim his reputation. When he learns his college roommate, a Miami plastic surgeon ("The Butt God of Miami Beach"), died falling off a hotel balcony, Bill sees a way to turn his pal's death into a book deal and cash. With no money, he heads down to investigate the death, staying with his estranged father, Melsor, at his crumbling Florida retirement condo, the Chateau Sedan Neuve, a stewpot of whining neighbors behaving badly. Melsor is a Russian dissident and Medicare fraudster who is determined to purge the condo board of its criminal element. Soon Bill becomes unwillingly entangled in Melsor's schemes, commits several felonies, and wonders what his friend was thinking as he was falling to his death. Filled with gags, slapstick, and snappy repartee, this satire provides sharp commentary on American society as well as an affecting story of old people with nowhere to go and no way to get there. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Having lost his job as a reporter at the Washington Post, William ("Bill") Melsorovich sets off for Florida to investigate the suspicious death of his college roommate Zbignew Stanislaw Wronski, a plastic surgeon known locally as the Butt God of Miami. Bill will renew his troubled relationship with his father, Melsor, who's challenging the condo board at Château Sedan Neuve, a high-rise overlooking the sea with a contentious bunch of residents, many Russian Jews. The Katzenelenbogens emigrated from the USSR when Bill was young, which explains why numerous sentences and paragraphs are written in Russian (always translated) but not, curiously and inexplicably, why some appear in the Cyrillic alphabet and others in the Latin. This book has the same sharp writing and madcap air of Goldberg's award-winning debut, The Yid, but it is a less assured work plagued by overwriting, as if the author's aim were to convince us of his undeniably impressive talent. Verdict To be savored more for its style than its story, this work will appeal to those who appreciate an offbeat sense of humor and the immigrant angle. [See Prepub Alert, 10/5/17.]-Edward Cone, New York © Copyright 2017. 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
Adrift and broke after losing his job at the Washington Post, William Katzenelenbogen descends into Trump-ian madness while visiting his estranged father in South Florida.Once a prizewinning investigative science reporter, Bill is motivated to fly South by the death of his old college roommate, Zbignew Wronski, a cosmetic surgeon known as the "Butt God of Miami Beach." Zbig fell from the 43rd-floor balcony of a hotel. Prodded by an old flame who wrote a bestselling memoir after the Post fired her for fabricating stories, Bill thinks there may be a book in his famous friend's apparent suicide. But the story that engulfs him is his Russian father Melsor's antic campaign against Greenstein, the Jewish fascist who heads the ruling block on the corrupt board of the old man's crumbling condo, the Chteau. Once a famed poet and dissident in Moscow (where Bill grew up), the 83-year-old Melsor has become a shameless hustler and supporter of "Donal'd Tramp," as he renders the name. He was indicted for Medicare fraud in New York for running a crooked ambulette service for invalids. Bill has never forgiven him for having a "two-bit crook" treat his late mother's breast cancer, leading to her early death. A master of dark, cutting humor, restless and allusive, Goldberg turns the Chteau, its Lexus-driving Russians, and a nearly 90-year-old American WWII veteran who drunkenly shoots at the ocean with his machine gun every night into a mad metaphor for Trump's America. The longer Bill stays, the more he gets dragged into its seamy swamp.Following up his acclaimed debut, The Yid (2016), Goldberg confirms his status as one of Jewish fiction's liveliest new voices, walking in the shoes of such deadpan provocateurs as Mordecai Richler and Stanley Elkin. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
