Depending on your outlook, life can seem a wonderful gift or a cruel joke. Solomon Kugel, the main character in Shalom Auslander’s latest novel, definitely belongs to the latter category.
Kugel is married to Bree and they have a son, Jonah. Kugel has moved his family, including his mother, to the small town Stockton. Kugel wants to live a place where nothing happens, or has ever happened. Just such a town is Stockton, and that is the only reason Kugel has chosen it for his family’s new home.
He’s very concerned with death, dying words, and epitaphs. A natural result of his mother’s obsession with the Holocaust. She talks and acts as if she has experienced horrible things, and lost most of her family to the concentration camps. This is to say the least a moderation of the truth, which is that most of the Kugel family has been living in America, safely, for generations.
To make things worse, Kugel finds a filthy and slightly crazy looking camp survivor who’s been living in the attic. She insists that she’s Anne Frank, and now he can’t bring himself to throw her out. Slowly his life begins to rip at the seams.
There is certainly a lot going on in Auslander’s novel. Both thematically and story wise. Dark humor permeates the text throughout:
Mother was alive if she sounded like she was dying; if she sounded like she was peacefully sleeping, then she was probably dead.
Kugel’s observations are funny and sad at the same time. In many ways he’s a gray and broken man. He indulges his mother’s constant lies and accepts the fact that his life’s been one long marathon of suffering. A childhood consisting of a constant barrage of books and documentaries on the Holocaust and the camps. When his sister inadvertently reveals a truth about their father he gives up the argument without much fight. His behavior is infuriating and hilarious at the same time.
Auslander is a brave man in his tackling of subjects that in many ways are taboo in the Jewish community. The comparisons of suffering is a theme that goes back to old Yiddish jokes and folk tales. It is a part of the Jewish self-perception in many ways, and the way it occurs in this novel is both poignant and a scathing satire at the same time.
Guilt is another important component of the novel and Kugel sees the birth of his son as one of his biggest transgressions. His descriptions of the guilt he feels are heartbreaking in their revelation of his worldview. They are also quite humorous.
Jonah was beautiful and innocent and pure, so Kugel felt terrible guilt for bringing him into this world. To father a child was a horribly selfish act, a felony, in fact - everyone here in this world is a kidnap victim from some better place, or no place at all, and Jonah had been dragged here, by Kugel and Bree, against his will, without provocation, without consent, without any good goddamned reason whatsoever beyond their own selfish desires.
The title of the novel is tied to Kugel’s behavior throughout the novel. The consequences of the human race having hope is given a unique and interesting perspective in the sessions Kugel has with his psychiatrist Professor Jove.
We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.
Jove goes on to describe Hitler, Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot as hopeful persons that took their hope to the most extreme and thereby caused catastrophes for the many people of their time.
Auslander’s writing both in style and subject matter is very reminiscent of the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. Auslander seems to be echoing and taking inspiration from his Studies in Pessimism in particular, a brilliant collection of essays that are available on Project Gutenberg for free. Penguins has also released a short collection of his writings in the Great Ideas series called On the Suffering of the World.
Auslander succeeds in placing himself in a long line of distinguished Jewish authors. There are lines to be drawn to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem and many others. At the same time he manages to write a novel bursting with originality, and a worldview one seldom encounters in modern literature. The honesty and bravery with which Auslander describes life is a testament to his unique abilities as a storyteller.
