Though all of Elkin's work is saturated with Jewish-American, Yiddish-tinged rhythms, few of his novels are explicitly, centrally Jewish in character and theme. This new book is extravagantly ethnic and blissfully sectarian, as Elkin drapes grotesque tall tales, baroque spiels, and irreverent parodies around a jaunty narrator: Jerry Goldkorm, a "pickup rabbi, God's little Hebrew stringer in New Jersey." Jerry, you see, is Rabbi of Lud, a tiny north N.J. town that exists only to service nearby Jewish cemetaries; congregationless, Jerry is employed by the local funeral home. In the novel's first, best section, delivered in a rambling monologue that mixes the profane, the preachy ("I'm speaking in my rabbi mode here"), and the grimly hilarious, Jerry reveals his weak academic past, his iffy command of Hebrew, and shares arcane, super-orthodox strictures. ("According to some interpretations of Talmud, a man may be denied his place with God if he can lift three times his own body weight.") He testily addresses God by funny names—tit for tat; details his ever-blazing lust for wife Shelley, who gets turned on by phylacteries and talks in babyish pidgin Yiddish; and frets about daughter Constance, 14, who's fed up with the morbidity and isolation of Lud. ("Daddy, our back yard is a cemetary!") Then, in a 90-page digression, Jerry recalls his year ('74-75) as Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline. There's a wayward plane trip, a wilderness-survival ordeal (featuring a dandy parody of outdoorsy uplift), and a surreal encounter with "an old Jew with a beard made out of flowers." More amusingly, there are tales of Jerry's weird success as Chief Rabbi, using reverse-psychology to draw crowds (largely non-Jewish) to Shavuoth services. The novel's final section returns to Lud—where Constance claims to have had a cemetary visit from none other than the Holy Mother, come "to rescue the poor lost souls of righteous Jews." (Holy Mother's drawl is half yenta, half Butterfly McQueen.) Constance's vision becomes an embarrassment, of course—to the funeral home (which is having money problems, anyway) and to the Rabbi, who's dabbling in adultery and real-estate salesmanship. Like most of Elkin's novels, this is episodic, disjointed, and unshapely. The verbal shenanigans (unwieldly parentheses, paragraph-long sentences, rococo riffs) occasionally get out of hand. But, though Rabbi Jerry isn't a fully credible or coherent character, his narration—loose, angry, half-hip, half. cloddish—gives the book a center. The combination of favorite Elkin themes—mortality, theology-ad-absurdum, hucksterism—generates loopy, creepily memorable vignettes. And while only a limited audience will appreciate all the layers of intensely allusive humor here, this is a bouncy, zestily outrageous comeback from The Magic Kingdom.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1987
ISBN: 1564782700
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1987
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.
Christian-fiction writer Martin (The Dead Don’t Dance, not reviewed) chronicles the personal tragedy of a Georgia heart surgeon.
Five years ago in Atlanta, Reese could not save his beloved wife Emma from heart failure, even though the Harvard-trained surgeon became a physician so that he could find a way to fix his childhood sweetheart’s congenitally faulty ticker. He renounced practicing medicine after her death and now lives in quiet anonymity as a boat mechanic on Lake Burton. Across the lake is Emma’s brother Charlie, who was rendered blind on the same desperate night that Reese fought to revive his wife on their kitchen floor. When Reese helps save the life of a seven-year-old local girl named Annie, who turns out to have irreparable heart damage, he is compassionately drawn into her case. He also grows close to Annie’s attractive Aunt Cindy and gradually comes to recognize that the family needs his expertise as a transplant surgeon. Martin displays some impressive knowledge about medical practice and the workings of the heart, but his Christian message is not exactly subtle. “If anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart,” Reese notes of his medical studies. Emma’s letters (kept in a bank vault) quote Bible verse; Charlie elucidates stories of Jesus’ miracles for young Annie; even the napkins at the local bar, The Well, carry passages from the Gospel of John for the benefit of the biker clientele. Moreover, Martin relentlessly hammers home his sentimentality with nature-specific metaphors involving mating cardinals and crying crickets. (Annie sells crickets as well as lemonade to raise money for her heart surgery.) Reese’s habitual muttering of worldly slogans from Milton and Shakespeare (“I am ashes where once I was fire”) doesn’t much cut the cloying piety, and an over-the-top surgical save leaves the reader feeling positively bruised.
Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 1-5955-4054-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: WestBow/Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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