Nobody Move, This Is A Review: HOPE: A TRAGEDY by Shalom Auslander

HOPE: A TRAGEDY opens with Solomon Kugel hearing strange sounds in the attic of the farmhouse he and his wife have recently bought after moving from Brooklyn to the small, rural community of Stockton. Fearing that the scratching sounds he hears in the attic are mice, Kugel goes to investigate. Much to his surprise, he discovers that the ‘scratching’ is in fact typing, and that the typist is an elderly woman who lives in the attic. Rather more surprising is the fact that the elderly woman is Anne Frank, previously, and famously, thought to have perished in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, but who has instead spent her entire life hiding out in attics.
  Being Jewish, Kugel finds himself in a bind. The tattoo on her arm confirms that the woman is indeed a Holocaust survivor, even if she isn’t Anne Frank. Will Kugel be the man to be identified as the Jew who threw a survivor out of his house? And what if the woman really is Anne Frank?
  HOPE: A TRAGEDY has been compared to a wide variety of Jewish writers, including Philip Roth and Woody Allen, but for me the novel was very much in the same vein as Kurt Vonnegut’s work, and I mean that as the highest of compliments.
  Auslander very elegantly, and hilariously, presents the reader with an impossible scenario, that of a man discovering that Anne Frank is alive and well in his farmhouse attic, and working on a novel which she hopes will trump the thirty-two million sales of The Diary of Anne Frank.
  For some, such a scenario may prove too irreverent, especially as it’s the case that Auslander has his characters engage with the Holocaust, and the entirety of Jewish persecution, in a way that few writers would have the courage to do. Essentially, Auslander is questioning the sacred cow of Jewish suffering, and asking tough questions about a culture, and an industry, that has grown up around the unquestioning acceptance of the Jews’ right to claim that their suffering trumps all others’.
  It’s a very tough sell, especially as Auslander is writing in the comic style - although it’s fair to say, I think, that the humour is of a very black pitch. For example, the first chapter is something of a very short prologue, about a man suffocating to death in a house fire. Chapter Two then opens with: ‘Solomon Kugel was lying in bed, thinking about suffocating to death in a house fire, because he was an optimist … Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel’s greatest failing.’
  But Auslander is being quite clever, I think, in his subject matter. While some might object to the irreverent way in which he writes about the Holocaust, for example, Auslander never fails to provide the context of the Holocaust, and never shies away from portraying the horrors, the banality of the evil, the sheer scale of the industrialisation of the attempted murder of an entire race. In other words, Auslander gets to have it both ways, and he copes with the balance remarkably well.
  Kugel himself is a very likeable character, the classically ‘nebbish’ Jewish character who is riven with paranoia and anxiety, and who is too self-aware for his own good. Constantly second-guessing himself, his heart is in the right place - who wouldn’t, if offered the opportunity, give Anne Frank a place to live? - but this clashes with his more immediate responsibilities, to his wife and young son. He is, naturally, in therapy, although Kugel’s therapist, Dr Jove, is a rather bracing man who preaches against hope and optimism. ‘Give Up,’ says the sign in Dr Jove’s office, ‘You’ll Live Longer’.
  Around Kugel, Auslander has created a number of enthralling characters. Chief among them is Anne Frank herself, whom Auslander re-imagines as an elderly crone, shuffling around an attic as she types her never-ending novel. Anne has been poisoned against the human race, as you might imagine, given her experiences, and proves to be a fairly callous, uncaring tenant, one given to pronouncements on the Holocaust that should shrivel the soul. She is a malign, brooding presence in the Kugel attic, and one which drives a wedge between Kugel and his wife, Bree.
  Kugel’s mother is another fascinating character. Abandoned by her husband as a young woman, leaving her to rear Kugel and his sister Hannah alone, Mother is an embittered creature who has learned to foist all of her disappointments in life on the Nazis. She blames the ‘sons of bitches’ for everything, even though she was born and raised long after WWII, in relative comfort in Brooklyn. ‘Ever since the war,’ she mutters whenever something goes wrong, which leads those who don’t know her well to presume that she suffered badly during the Holocaust. For those who do know her, and particularly her family, they learn to accept her self-association with the Holocaust as one of her many quirks and foibles. From pg 107, when Kugel and Mother are talking about when it’s appropriate to tell a three-year-old boy about the Holocaust:

Reason rarely worked with Mother, so Kugel had appealed, as he often did, to her emotions. As destructive as her way of showing it may have been, Kugel believed she loved Jonah deeply, and genuinely cared, first and foremost, for his well-being.
  You’re going to scare him, Kugel said, looking deep into her eyes.
  Somebody has to, Mother replied.

  The novel is a classic novel-of-ideas, with Auslander freewheeling through a variety of concepts, exploring philosophies and putting his very idiosyncratic spin on them. For all the whimsical, irreverent humour, and its apparently ludicrous central concept, the novel has very serious things to say about the human condition, and humanity’s constant ability to generate hope and optimism despite all the evidence to the contrary. Strip away the jokes and Kugel’s self-flagellating mind-set and the story becomes a very bleak tale of the inevitability of death, and the extent to which hope is a self-deluding folly; and more, a dangerous folly, for there is no depth, the novel warns, to which humanity will not sink.
  The novel is also an exploration of the creative process, Anne Frank typing away in the Kugels’ attic being a metaphor, presumably, for Auslander’s struggle to write fiction, even as someone stalks the darkness outside, bent on burning down Kugel’s farmhouse. It is chock-a-block with literary references, from some very pointed and funny comments on Philip Roth’s superstar status in the literary establishment in New York, to throwaway mentions of Zelig, and Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, and a whole range of final utterings by famous people.
  HOPE: A TRAGEDY is a wonderful novel. The writing is wonderfully arch, the humour is brilliantly bleak, and it’s a book bursting with ideas, concepts and notions. It’s subversive, irreverent, scabrously funny and profound - in short, it represents for me everything a novel should be, raising far more questions than it provides answers for, and asking the reader to decide, in the end, if the writer is serious or not. I believe he is deadly serious about the philosophical notions in the book, and that there’s an incandescent anger about the Holocaust burning brightly between each and every line. - Declan Burke

The Pigeon Who Didn’t Want To Fly Home

Darragh McManus (right) waxes lyrical on the pigeonholing of writers below, and while Darragh might be an extreme example of the desire of a writer to write in different styles, genres and disciplines (Darragh’s the guy who kicked the ‘ass’ right back into Renaissance Man, basically), he makes a valid point or three.
  Two of the Grand Viz’s favourite novels were written by William Goldman, but it’s difficult to imagine two more different stories than those of MARATHON MAN and THE PRINCESS BRIDE (plus Goldman wrote Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and The Right Stuff, and a veritable buncha other novels and movies and non-fiction books). Closer to home, we’re always mightily impressed with Gene Kerrigan’s work, regardless if he’s writing novels, non-fiction or his weekly journalism. Another example is John Connolly, whose standalone THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS is very different to his Charlie Parker novels, something of a minor masterpiece, and in the not-entirely-humble opinion of the Grand Viz, his finest work to date. Word around the not-entirely-metaphorical campfire is that Connolly’s book-after-next will not be a crime fiction novel, and we for one are already looking forward to it.
  So, yes, we’re perfectly open to the idea of a writer breaking fresh ground. By the same token, the Grand Viz can’t imagine wanting to read anything by Raymond Chandler outside of crime fiction; thinks Elmore Leonard is a genius in a low key, but has never read any of his Western stories, even though he loves Western movies; and cheerfully admits that he misspent a goodly portion of his youth re-reading THE CATCHER IN THE RYE but has little time for Salinger’s short stories, with the notable exception of ‘Teddy’.
  Anyway, the question is: are publishers short-changing readers by presuming they’re Pavlovian dimwits (how else to explain James Patterson?); or are they canny buggers really, who know us better than we think we know ourselves? Darragh, squire? Over to you …

My name is Darragh, and I’m a writer.
  Actually, I’ll be more specific – my name is Darragh and I want to write all sorts of things, but I’m not sure that this is possible. Let me explain.
  When I was growing up I read comic books, thrillers, crime novels, horror novels, lurid western paperbacks full of terrible Apache atrocities and even worse Apache stereotypes. I also read what might be termed ‘high literature’, albeit mainly suitable for children: ROBINSON CRUSOE, LAST OF THE MOHICANS, Sherlock Holmes stories. I seem to remember making a stab at JANE EYRE, aged around 12, which surely was a triumph of optimism over probability – if I couldn’t master this turgid leviathan in university, what hope had I at that age?
  Basically, I read any and all available printed matter, from timeless classics to the ingredients on cereal packets, and it all had an influence.
  Around my mid-teens the notion that I wanted to write for a living became formalised, became concrete in my mind. And what I wanted to write was … well, everything and anything.
  My favourite writers of all time, probably, are Don DeLillo and Margaret Atwood; therefore profound, elliptical, exquisitely crafted literature was definitely on my authorial ‘to-do’ list. My favourite books of all time are NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and I’ve always enjoyed sci-fi; therefore a paradigm-shattering, futuristic dystopia had to be tackled at some point.
  I had a soft spot for the Gothic horror of Anne Rice, Mary Shelly, Stoker, Poe et al; therefore a grand Gothic of my own (probably set in Ireland, the genre’s and my spiritual home) was factored into the master-plan. I adored comic books (particularly the more mature, ambiguous stuff like Alan Moore and Frank Miller), loved the way they married the visual and the verbal, word and image; therefore an award-winning creation, with huge movie spin-off potential, was marked as essential.
  Aged 23 I read Sarah Dunn’s THE OFFICIAL SLACKER HANDBOOK, the funniest book ever hewn by god or woman, and a collection of Woody Allen’s satire; therefore I allotted some future effort to making ‘em laugh, laugh, laugh. And I also loved James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard and Christopher Brookmyre, among many other crime writers; therefore I would, in this totipotential career awaiting me, find time for a series of dark, edgy crime novels, possibly with a metaphysical twist. (The details, as I’m sure you all recognise, were still a little fuzzy.)
  Hell, I probably even told myself I’d knock out something way post-modern, so hip it hurt, based on those cereal packet ingredients. The Tao of Vitamin B12 (a novel in B12 parts) …
  That was the plan, book-wise. In the day-job – journalism – I also desired diversity, variety, all those colours of the rainbow. I wanted to write about sport, movies, philosophy, politics, celebrity nonsense. I wanted to write serious social commentary and the silliest satire imaginable. I wanted to do interviews and reviews, match reports and features, restaurant criticism and news analysis.
  I wanted it all, baby – it’s the capitalist in me, I guess.
  So what’s the problem, I hear you ask? The problem is this: publishing and media (and in a broader sense, society) don’t want the Renaissance man or woman, the versatile epicurean of letters who can dip their quill into just about area they choose. They want to pigeonhole writers.
  Example: I spent two years, early in a journalistic career of a decade, editing an Irish sports magazine. Editing it, I might add, as a part-time gig, during which I also wrote features and satire for other magazines and newspapers. Forever after, I am known to some folks as ‘the guy who’s into sport’. I swear to God, I still meet people who say to me, ‘Oh, you write about sport, don’t you?’ Well, yes, I mean, I did up to 2001 which isn’t that long ago, so yeah, I suppose you’re not too far off the mark.
  And how does this relate to books – more accurately, to the contents of this here blog? It appears to me that it is very difficult to forge a career as a crime writer AND serious novelist AND purveyor of cheap horror tricks AND smart satirist AND who knows what else. The business, the culture and the audience don’t seem to want writers to diversify. We are encouraged to find our niche, get good at it and stick to it.
  Otherwise, whoa, who knows what might happen? We don’t want to surprise the reader, after all. God forbid a writer should challenge expectations or give a little flip to preconceptions, right?
  This is why someone like John Banville writes crime fiction under an assumed name, even though everyone knows it’s him. Benjamin Black isn’t a proper pseudonym which hides the author’s identity, but it delineates the literary, ‘serious’ Banville from the (assumed) mass-market thrills of crime fiction. He has a reputation to protect, after all. The Banville brand must be preserved in dust and amber.
  It’s why Sebastian Faulks publishes an espionage thriller with the caveat, ‘writing as Ian Fleming’. Or Steven King writes sci-fi under the name Richard Bachman. Or Iain Banks does likewise but only after inserting a middle initial on the book cover. Or a thousand other examples.
  I wonder why this is so in publishing – the field of artistic endeavour, one would imagine, that is most open to genre-busting, to freshness and the unexpected. After all, directors are allowed make movies of different kinds. Bands are applauded when they veer off in new directions. Even TV actors – the ultimate hacks in the ultimate hack medium – often quit their soap or medical drama to play a radically different character.
But for us poor writers? Get used to staying stuck in the same place.
  My first book, GAA CONFIDENTIAL, was a humorous, ironic little romp about Irish sports and culture, and I was so afraid of being ghettoised as a sportswriter that I seriously considered publishing under a nom de plume. (Thank God nobody actually read the thing, so I escaped that trap …).
  I’ve also written what might be termed a ‘literary’ novel, a collection of short stories on one motif, a crime novel with a vigilante angle, a fairly avant-garde play about dreams and memory, a broad comedy film script, a slacker drama film script, a collection of satirical pieces on pop culture and media, and the beginnings of a spoof history of the universe and a satirical travel book. I have about fifty other ideas in my computer for novels, plays, TV shows, movies, comic books.
  What’s wrong with the above list? I’ll tell you – it’s all over the place. Too diffuse, too varied, too unfocused. I mean, does this fella want to be a novelist or a comedian or a screenwriter or the new John Connolly or the new John Banville? Or what? (Wow – looking at like that, it’s no wonder I’m still waiting on a publishing deal.)
Meanwhile I’ve been trying to get satirical stuff published in British and Irish papers for over a year now, with limited success. Let me stress, in all modesty, that it’s not because the material isn’t funny, or accessible, or entertaining, because it is all three. The people turning it down even tell me so. But it’s just ‘not right’ for them, or it’s all a bit left-field, or maybe I should concentrate more on what I’m already doing …
  So I set up a blog, basically to promote myself and my work. Hopefully the features editor of the Guardian or New York Times will be passing by, stop for a gander and be enraptured by that hilarious rewriting of Hamlet in the style of Eastenders. But I’m not too confident.
  People always say, ‘Have faith in yourself.’ I have faith in myself, as I’m sure do all of you. The problem is that I don’t necessarily have faith in society, and in the publishing and media industries. I don’t have faith that any of us will be allowed a writing career encompassing crime fiction, heavily researched non-fiction, historical romances, poetry, action-espionage thrillers, elegiac non-linear novels wherein nothing happens and happens really goddamn slowly, or whatever our heads and hearts tell us to put on paper. I don’t have faith that one can earn a reputation as a journalist who writes equally strongly on sober matters and satirical daftness.
  For me there is absolutely no dichotomy in any of this. I see no tension between the guy who writes a meditative novel about death and the guy who writes a film script which crosses The Naked Gun with Commando.
  But that’s just me. The industry, I fear, goes by an inversion of the old catchphrase: ‘Now for something exactly the same as the last time.’ – Darragh McManus

A veritable cornucopia of writing can be found at Darragh’s blog, Satire For Hire