FICTION: ARMINTA WALLACEreviews Hope: A TragedyBy Shalom Auslander Picador, 304pp. £16.99
HOPE: A TRAGEDY is a comedy. It’s also highly serious and extremely clever. It opens as its nervy Jewish anti-hero, Solomon Kugel – think Woody Allen at his nerviest – hears rustling in the roof of his salubrious farmhouse in rural New York. Fearing that it’s either mice or the arsonist who has been burning down just such salubrious farmhouses in the locality, he sallies into the attic – and finds an old woman living up there, in pretty unsalubrious conditions. Worse, she claims to be Anne Frank.
In “real” life, Frank is as close as Judaism gets to a saint. But this woman is anything but saintly. She is smelly, feisty and obsessively working on a follow-up to her bestselling diary. When Kugel tries to coax her off his property she yells at him. “Thirty-two million copies, that’s nothing to sneeze at! I will leave this attic when I finish this book, and not one moment sooner!”
The hapless Kugel, unable to evict the stowaway – what would history say about a Jew who threw the elderly Anne Frank out of his attic? – can only watch as his life, already in disarray, spirals into chaos.
Much of the comedy comes from Kugel’s relationship with his mother, who is living with him and his family on the grounds that she is dying, though she is clearly as strong as an ox. Mother Kugel fancies herself a Holocaust survivor – despite having been born in Brooklyn in 1945 – and still berates her son for an incident that took place in his childhood. On a tour of Holocaust sites, the boy smiled nervously as the family lined up for a holiday snapshot in front of a crematorium. “‘You ruined the whole concentration camp for me, you know that?’ she scolded. ‘You ruined the whole damn camp.’ ”
Kugel can’t keep his mind from picking over these scars from his own life and from Jewish history. Mulling over the family-photograph incident, he returns again and again to a famous image from Bergen-Belsen in which most of the male prisoners lie on bunks while one naked, skeletal man stands half-smiling at the camera. Does the smile indicate hope, Kugel wonders. If so, what is the man hoping for? To survive or to die quickly?
Kugel is inclined to believe his therapist, Prof Jove, who insists that hope is a delusion and causes only unhappiness. On the other side of this existential fence is his dreadful brother-in-law, Pinkus, an academic who believes that the world is becoming a more caring, less violent place.
Auslander’s probing of the philosophical distinctions between hope and optimism, suffering and misery, is mercilessly acute, his rejection of pious platitudes uncompromising. In this, the book succeeds brilliantly, and I admire it hugely.
So why don’t I love it more? Maybe it depends where one is coming from as a reader. I’m not sure I’m able for the fiercely vitriolic flavour of Auslander’s humour. I found his repeated emphasis on excrement in the air vents tiresome and tasteless – though I now suspect it’s an insider Jewish reference of some kind that I’m just not getting.
In the end, having loved the set-up – and the first half – of Hope: A Tragedy, I was disappointed by the novel’s refusal to go anywhere more interesting in the closing chapters, and in particular by its lack of interest in Kugel’s wife, Bree, and their son, Jonah, who never develop into anything more than ciphers.
It’s an amusing read, for sure – though no more amusing than, say, Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel, The Yiddish Policemens Union. And it’s thought-provoking – though no more so than Nathan Englander’s recent story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, much less his fantastic debut collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. If you’re going to read this one, do yourself a favour and read those others as well.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
