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by Adam Langer
In a word (or two or three): who wants to smack that dude on the cover?
From Mr. Hipster:
Despite the mystique of California in both
songs and movies, the love affair hasn't made its way to books in
the same way. It's trendy and somewhat hipsterish to write about lesser
states in order to up your doldrums factor (aka: introduce realism
into your story) that will bring back the author's abusive childhood
in Nowhere, Nebraska or Malady-Ridden, Maine. Now, I thought, here's
a nice book about Cali that may recall some of my childhood.
It turns out the damn book is about Chicago! This bastard Langer had
fooled me. Me, the Baron of Books, the Regal Reader, Prince Peruser.
And then I remembered that I had read the synopsis on Amazon and knew
this fact like six months ago when I actually ordered the book. Anyway,
it turns out California is a street in downtown Chicago that approximates
the proverbial "tracks." The West side is the right side
(ironically), while the East side is the wrong side (although not
that wrong until you go further East past whatever Avenue). The story
essentially follows the exploits of three families, and their extended
network, living their intertwined lives west of California, east of
California and east of east of California. Some are upwardly mobile,
some the victims of circumstance and others simply going where life
leads them. I'm always shocked when I read an overtly Jewish book
that has topped best seller lists. I know my people pride themselves
on telling and/or showing people how smart they are by reading books
(why do you think I write these horrible reviews--I'm not all 'f'
words and b-movies), but making up less than 2% of the U.S. isn't
exactly going to move markets--unless we're all buying 2000 copies.
But this book is all bar-mitzvahs and brachas. It even out-Jews your
best Roth book. The story is clearly based on the author's upbringing
in that neighborhood, as his familiarity is almost photographic (and
may be at that). He claims in the afterward that he just draws little
details for his characters from his own life, but I have a feeling
that if you looked hard enough his adolescence is sitting right out
there on the page. The book takes place around the Iran hostage crisis
and the shift in the US after the 1980 election of Reagan. The characters
are between five and ten years older than me, and what a difference
those years make (as was pointed out by the author). When even "Yeshiva
Boys" are getting laid and smoking pot in high school, I know
I missed a lot growing up in the era of "just say no (to both
sex and drugs)." Jealousy aside, I did enjoy Langer's breezy
prose and clever interweaving of narratives. Like many novels of its
ilk, the story serves as a slice of life in a finite amount of time
during a certain era, and isn't in itself a particularly robust or
fascinating plot-driven narrative. The book ends with much of the
character's lives and arcs unresolved in a big "aha!" kind
of way, but, like life itself, things aren't always wrapped up neatly
for everyone in a certain chunk of time. I'm always secretly disappointed
when these books just kind of end without like the world exploding
into a trillion pieces, or the benchwarming slow kid getting his big
chance to run the ball and then dropping dead from his terminal brain
tumor to the cheers of the crowd after crossing the goal line, but
I've watched too many movies and sitcoms where we just expect our
endings to be tied up with a bow and handed to us on a silver platter.
I should be used to the non-ending ending by now; I really should
be. But a guy can always pray for that fireball or that Martian
Chronicles ending, can't he?
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