A Review: Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander

10:24 am - January 13, 2012: 5 notes

A Review: Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander

Far above many things—natural athletic ability, green thumbs, fast cars—I admire funny writers. Writers who can make readers smile or, even, laugh, who know how to balance humor and heft, deserve great praise.

Shalom Auslander, a rare writer, has a keen sense of humor that seems to rise effortlessly from his prose and his characters. But he is far more than funny: Auslander is terrifying. If there is anything I admire more than a funny writer, it’s a funny writer who can simultaneously send me into an existential crisis.

Readers may be surprised by Hope’s deep tones and poignancy since the premise is so bizarre: Solomon Kugel and his family have recently moved into a farmhouse in upstate New York. The farmhouse has a funny smell. The smell, Kugel discovers, emanates from the attic, where an aged Anne Frank (yes, that Anne Frank) has hidden for thirty or forty years. Where can a writer take such a strange, yet disturbingly simple, story? For Auslander, the story resides in the juxtaposition of Anne Frank and Kugel’s very different dispositions. The second chapter begins:

Solomon Kugel was lying in bed, thinking about suffocating to death in a house fire, because he was an optimist. This was according to his trusted guide and advisor, Professor Jove. So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn’t stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel’s greatest failing.

Readers will readily realize that Kugel’s worry has little to do with optimism: he spends his time brainstorming potential dying words, dreaming of tombstone inscriptions for himself and his family, and asking to hide in others’ attics in case “something happened” (the horrors of the Holocaust having been hammered into him by his manic mother, who wishes she had ever suffered so much).

Anne has lived through “something.” She may be a recluse in an attic but she is, we are often reminded, “a survivor”—a person who has (in this fiction) had the luck to experience the worst. Kugel is not a survivor; Kugel, a man so racked with misery because he is not miserable, represents the sad, contemporary man. His brother-in-law’s analysis: “…peace frightens us. Expecting hell, we’re ill prepared for heaven.” And so Auslander impales us with his double-whammy of funny and frightening. Readers will laugh at Kugel’s paranoia, his distinctly depressing view of the world. And, then, the other feeling will encroach. Readers will wonder: am I more like Kugel or Anne? What if “something” does happen? It’s happened before. And wouldn’t it be accurate if all tombstones read, “Born, unfortunately. Died eventually,” as Kugel imagines?

In his praise of Hope: A Tragedy, the author Howard Jacobson (The Finkler Question) wrote, “What makes [Auslander] so terrifyingly funny is that he isn’t joking.” I do hope Jacobson is somewhat mistaken in that thought. “Terrifyingly funny,” absolutely, but to succeed the novel must stand on the feet of exaggeration and, somewhat, mockery. The author’s light tone and playfulness insist that readers should laugh at least as much as they contemplate their existences and eventual deaths.

Being funny is no easy task. Being funny about the Holocaust? Good luck to you, I would say, but Auslander does not need my well wishes. He has written a brilliantly funny and poignant novel about what it means to survive—through the Holocaust or through the terrors of modern life.