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
An emotionally acute study of manliness.
Scenes from the life of a well-off but emotionally damaged man.
Szalay’s sixth novel is a study of István, who as a 15-year-old in Hungary is lured into a sexual relationship with a married neighbor; when he has a confrontation with the woman’s husband, the man falls down the stairs and dies. Add in stints in a juvenile facility and as a soldier in Iraq, and István enters his 20s almost completely stunted emotionally. (Saying much besides “Okay” sometimes seems utterly beyond him.) Fueled by id, libido, and street drugs, he seems destined to be a casualty until, while working as a bouncer at a London strip club, he helps rescue the owner of a security firm who’s been assaulted; soon, he’s hired as the driver for a tycoon and his wife, with whom he begins an affair. István is a fascinating character in a kind of negative sense—he’s intriguing for all the ways he fails to confront his trauma, all the missed opportunities to find deeper connections. To that end, Szalay’s prose is emotionally bare, deliberately clipped and declarative, evoking István’s unwillingness (or incapacity) to look inside himself; he occasionally consults with a therapist, but a relentless passivity keeps him from opening up much. His capacity to fail upwards eventually catches up with him, and the novel becomes a more standard story about betrayal and inheritances, but it also turns on small but meaningful moments of heroism that suggest a deeper character than somebody who, as someone suggests, “exemplif[ies] a primitive form of masculinity.” István’s relentlessly stony approach to existence grates at times—there are a few too many “okay”s in the dialogue—but Szalay’s distanced approach has its payoffs. Being closed off, like István, doesn’t close off the world, and at times has tragic consequences.
An emotionally acute study of manliness.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781982122799
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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