January 4, 2021
Landes’s darkly funny debut chronicles a suburban schlemiel’s endless capacity for self-sabotage. Living in the rigid orthodox Jewish community of New Niles, Meiselman outwardly plays the dutiful son and husband. Yet, on the inside, he is itching for greater recognition. He finds an opportunity when his boss, head of the local public library, takes ill and asks him to moderate an upcoming discussion with controversial author Izzy Shenkenberg, a former classmate of Meiselman’s. Shenkenberg has shrugged off the yoke of their religious upbringing and is famous for writing a novel condemned by a local rabbi for “severe sins of evil speech, scoffing, gossip, slander, and demeaning Torah scholars.” Meiselman decides to play the hero and give Shenkenberg his comeuppance for scandalizing their congregation, but in the week leading up to the event, Meiselman’s delusions of grandeur repeatedly collide with reality, to tragic and hilarious effect. Landes succeeds in depicting the nuances of the religious community, though some of Meiselman’s more outlandish fantasies and flashbacks detailing sexual confessions to his therapist tread too closely to Portnoy’s Complaint territory. Fans of Shalom Auslander will appreciate this.
October 1, 2020
A suburban man confronts a series of shortcomings--sexual, professional, and otherwise--in this rambunctious, Mitty-esque tale. The title character of Landes' ambitious debut novel is a 36-year-old man navigating a series of low-grade crises over the course of a week. As an administrator at a public library outside Chicago, he's slated to interview an acclaimed author whose latest novel allegedly mars the good name of a beloved rabbi they knew growing up. Efforts to conceive with his wife are falling short, and the blame falls squarely on him. His neighbor's gardening habits are exasperating--pre-dawn lawn mowing, pools of standing water in her backyard--but since she's a Holocaust survivor he must tread gingerly. His seatmate at shul is a beefy boor, his beloved White Sox are struggling, his older brother is more accomplished--the trials never end for our nebbishy hero. "Meiselman was fed up, literally and figuratively, with everyone putting their dirty paws on him," he laments. "After thirty-six years, Meiselman had reached a limit, a breaking point." Though these crises are all relatively small beer, there's an inherent comedy in Meiselman's working up the nerve to work up some nerve, which leads to some peculiar acts, including a masturbatory calamity in bed with his wife and quasi-flirtation with a community college student researching Julius Caesar. Stylistically, the novel reads like a pastiche of contemporary Jewish American lit: It evokes the grievance-struck longueurs of Bellow's Herzog, the anxiety of Sam Lipsyte and Gary Shteyngart's schlubby, emasculated protagonists, and the heterodox satire of 1970s Roth. With so much literary baggage, the novel strains to achieve full liftoff, but many of its set pieces are great fun, the more cringeworthy the better; Meiselman's struggles to be a good husband, employee, and Jew are serious, but there's comedy in his falling short. A brash, bulky yarn about one man's determination to get his life in order.
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