Guilt and Rescue

By SANFORD PINSKER

WHO BY FIRE
By Diana Spechler
343 pages. Harper Perennial. $14.95.

Who By Fire, Diana Spechler’s debut novel, adds some attractive new wrinkles to the old-fashioned Jewish-American-family saga. In the benighted days before the one-two punch of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy’s Complaint (l969), the Jewish-family novel in America was largely about the uncompromising Orthodoxy of grandfathers, the hot passions of politically engaged uncles, and parents desperately trying to make it in America. Such families were a raucous mix of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing, of generations at odds with one another yet formed by—and sharing—a Jewish identity each would have defined differently.

Before Roth, nobody would have thought to call these fictional Jewish families “dysfunctional,” but that is what they probably were. In our Roth-centric universe, dysfunctional Jewish families have (alas) become the norm and beginning writers are hard pressed to come up with ways to tweak the formula. Another novel about a nagging Jewish mother? Been there, done that; and the same is true for lousy Jewish fathers and ungrateful, entirely spoiled Jewish-American kids.

The marvel is that Who By Fire not only breaks new ground but also raises troubling questions about the landscape of contemporary Jewish life. Why so? Because in this novel, a college-age son decides to renounce the secular world and devote himself to study-and-prayer in an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva, a slightly older daughter indiscriminately sleeps around, a mother goes to extraordinary lengths to rescue her son from what she regards as a cult, and a father simply walks out—all this because, 13 years earlier, the youngest family member, a six-year-old named Elena, was kidnapped, and presumably murdered. The Kellerman family tsuris begins at this point, and just keeps growing. Her older brother, Ash—later changed to “Asher”—blames himself for not doing more when a strange automobile pulled up to the house and Elena got in. He is hardly alone where versions of “guilt” are concerned; it is one of the threads that each of the surviving family members share, just as “rescue,” variously defined, is what motivates Ellie Kellerman, Ash’s mother, to seek out a professional deprogrammer and Bits, his older sister, to steal enough money to buy a plane ticket to Israel.

Spechler’s novel is a study in multiple perspectives: alternating chapters are told in the voices of Ellie, Asher, and Bits. Asher identifies himself as a Ba’al Tshuva, which he defines as “returning to God” and always and “in a constant state of repentance.” Bits finds her brother’s newly minted Orthodoxy simultaneously odd and off-putting:

… I go through the junk drawer in the kitchen until I find Ash’s letter. It’s dated by the Jewish calendar: 16 Nisan 3762.

Bits, I went to Rosh Hanikra. The waves blow against the grottoes at night. It’s so beautiful... Back to Jerusalem tomorrow. I just learned this: When we die, G-d will ask why didn’t you taste all My Fruits?

He won’t spell out "God" anymore. In my head, I start composing a letter to him. I’ll sign it, Love, B-ts.

Ash’s mother, by contrast, is not amused. In a desperate effort to lure Ash back from Israel, she hatches up a number of schemes designed to reverse his religious brainwashing. What she wants, above all else, is "normality," which she defines as becoming a mainstream success and keeping one’s religious impulses in check.

The good news about Who By Fire is that the conflict between a largely secular parent and a newly minted religious son rivets our attention and makes us want to turn the page (I can easily imagine the heated discussions that will result if Who By Fire makes it onto the Jewish-book-club circuit); unfortunately, the bad news is that Spechler lacks the skill to give her mother, son, and daughter distinctive voices. Granted, their points-of-view are hardly interchangeable but their language and phrasing often are. In an interview, Spechler tells us that her first literary love was J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. She is hardly alone in falling head over heels for Holden Caulfield’s altogether infectious voice, but I kept hearing faint echoes of Salinger’s hypersensitive teenager sprinkled throughout Who By Fire. Let one example stand for many: “This is what happens when you try to rescue someone: there is embarrassing, ineffectual melodrama, like a fire truck blaring sirens, speeding toward a cat in a tree.”

Given the various plot elements that Spechler so adroitly throws out, I was hoping for more substance, more depth, in the final pages. Certain unwritten codes about book reviewing make it impossible for me either to give away the ending or to talk at length about what lies in store for Bits (pregnant, and unmarried) or what Asher’s quest for religious purity ultimately will come to. Suffice it to say that novels able to dramatize the assets and liabilities of Jewish life within the fences of the Law are extremely rare, and satisfactory literary resolutions of this conflict even rarer.

Who By Fire may raise richer questions than it can answer, at least in this early stage of Spechler’s career, but it is an ambitious novel nonetheless. Strip some of the layers of melodrama away, along with a need to tie up loose ends with a oversized red bow, and what remains is a sharply etched Jewish family novel for the 21^st century.