You might suppose, should you have any familiarity with the writings of Gary Shteyngart, which are widely (and not inaccurately) assumed to be autobiographical, that the author has a bit of a self-loathing problem. Many people do: Papa Shteyngart, for example, frequently exhorts his “Little Son,” “Don’t write like a self-hating Jew.” Papa and Mama…
● The Scent of Pine By Lara Vapnyar Simon & Schuster, 192 pages, $25 Twist endings must be well-beloved, so often are they deployed today. (Here’s a twist: Let things be what they are.) To be fair, late-in-the-game surprises, especially when things add up, more or less, are mostly a reviewing annoyance, forcing a reckoning…
Little Failure By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 368 pages, $27 It was perhaps inevitable that Gary Shteyngart would one day write a memoir. Like other authors who traffic in fiction that is thinly-veiled autobiography — or, as in Shtyengart’s case, that appears as shadow puppet projections of his own Russian Jewish immigrant story — the…
There was a time, not so long ago, in the 1960s and ’70s, when being a serious fiction writer required not just a talent for evoking nuanced moments of lived life, but a consciousness of the intellectual and political context in which our lives were being lived. Writers — many of them Jewish — as…
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books By Claudia Roth Pierpont Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages, $27 Now that Philip Roth has quit (or “quit,” depending on the degree to which you find his retirement announcement believable) writing, the oeuvre assessments have begun. One of the first is Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Roth Unbound.” Subtitled…
● Textile By Orly Castel-Bloom Translated by Dalya Bilu The Feminist Press, 160 pages, $15.95 In Orly Castel-Bloom’s “Textile,” Amanda Gruber deploys an unusual strategy to help manage her particularly Israeli brand of maternal anxiety about the fate of her combat soldier son: undergoing serial cosmetic surgery. As the novel opens, Amanda is about to…
Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge By Peter Orner Little, Brown, 208 pages, $16.99 Every seasoned author has overarching themes that he or she explores, to success or failure, across a series of books. Mediocrity and defeat — twin afflictions that beset the narrators in Peter Orner’s mournful and moving fiction — are worthy companions,…
Between Friends By Amos Oz Translator Sondra Silverston Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 192 pages, $24 As historian Derek Penslar has remarked, the kibbutz is “one of the hallmarks of the Zionist project, and although it appears to have reached its end as a generative and innovative force within Israeli society, the kibbutz’s historical grandeur and significance…
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