IF FROGS COULD FLY

A debut novel features a rabbi and a journalist who embark on an exotic journey.

At the beginning of this story set in 2016, happy, prosperous freelance journalist Ron Levine is fresh from a Miami Beach morning swim (and a brief encounter with a hammerhead shark). Running some errands for his wife prior to a dinner with their friends the Applebaums and the possible landfall of Hurricane Bessie, he encounters Rabbi Mandelson in a parking lot. The two take shelter from a thunderstorm in Ron’s car, where the rabbi offers him a chance to accompany him and a crew as they navigate the jungles of Peru in search of “a lost tribe of Israel.” The rabbi is certain the tribe exists, hidden in the forest. During the expedition, in a classic comic move on Mendel’s part, the team’s biblical scholar, Rabbi Karpadah, in an excess of in-the-jungle enthusiasm, kisses a tree frog. The viral infection that results quickly sweeps the world. When Rabbi Mandelson and Ron meet again two years later in the book’s second part, the whole tone of the narrative has changed accordingly. This opens up avenues for a dramatic increase in the unpredictable and the downright weird. The inventive novel’s second half centers on the bizarre adventures of the Levines and the Applebaums. Readers who were startled by the touches of magical realism in the story’s first section will be swamped by it in the second part. The author handles the integration of both halves very well, although there are annoying stylistic tics scattered throughout the work. Mendel is prone to larding scenes with extraneous details, and the character interactions are sometimes startlingly unrealistic. The combined effect has the strengths and weaknesses of most trippy fiction. Both the real world and the surreal realms sometimes end up feeling less than convincing.

A highly imaginative, if occasionally muddled, tale about the effects of a plague.