January 29, 2024
Adult brothers grapple with the revelation of a shocking family secret in the meandering fiction debut from journalist Fenton (Stolen Years). In the mid-1990s, rabbi Yossi Kugel arrives in Moab, Ga., to energize the town’s small Jewish population. Twelve-year-old twins Marty and David Belkin begin studying for their bar mitzvahs with the “gnome-bearded man in funeral garb,” who hires their mother Ida Mae as a secretary. Twenty years later, David lives a mostly secular life, while Marty, who’s changed his name to Mayer, is ensconced in a Brooklyn yeshiva and married to the devout Sarah. When Ida Mae dies, leaving behind a suicide note revealing that she’d lied about being Jewish, the brothers’ lives are upended. Estranged for years, they reunite for a road trip through the Deep South that’s described by a friend of David’s as a Jewish version of Rumspringa. There’s plenty of potential here: Fenton’s wry and ingratiating narration touches on rich themes of identity formation, belonging, and exclusion. Unfortunately, that promise is undercut by thinly developed characters whose dramatic inner transformations (such as Mayer’s quick turnaround from hyper-observant Torah scholar to seeker curious about the wider world) can feel unearned. This falls short of its intriguing premise. Agent: Murray Weiss, Catalyst Literary Management.
May 1, 2024
Estranged twin brothers, one a rabbi and the other a reprobate businessman, reunite after the death of their mother for a road trip through the Deep South after learning she wasn't Jewish--and so neither are they. And not only are Mayer, the rabbi, and David, his drug-fueled brother, not Jewish, as she raised them in Georgia--a shocking truth revealed in her suicide note--her grandfather was "a Nazi of some kind." Mayer, who studies the Torah the way some people devour pizza (it kills him not to be able to read it during his period of mourning, as per Jewish law), hatches a plan to convert to Judaism before returning home to his devout wife in Brooklyn. He defines goyhood as "the state of rebounding from one travesty to the next" and a lot of mishegas goes under the bridge, including a highway incident involving the one-eyed dog they rescue, a Larry David-like blowup at the Baby Light My Fireworks store in Mississippi when they object to its self-bagging policy, and the addition of David's influencer friend Charlayne, who offends Mayer by sleeping in David's bed. She sees their sojourn as a Jewish version of Rumspringa, but the book has more the feel of a Jewish Confederacy of Dunces (its New Orleans scenes feed that comparison) albeit without its satirical edge and dark sense of purpose. As entertaining a ride as this first novel by veteran New York reporter Fenton can be, the humor grows stale, the characters are pretty much locked in place even as Mayer is drawn into the secular life, and the soundtrack (Bob Dylan, Patsy Cline, Creedence Clearwater Revival) seems piped in from another book. A novel with plenty of spritz but not much follow-through.
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