The Angry Young Jewish Man

By LAWRENCE GOODMAN

BEWARE OF GOD
By Shalom Auslander
208 pages. Simon & Schuster. $19.95

Shalom Auslander is angry at God. A lapsed Orthodox Jew who was twice nabbed for shoplifting as a kid and then sent off to a strict reform school in the Negev Desert, he is now out to settle the score with his deity. All those strict, and self-denying religious laws he was forced to obey as a child ? Auslander, in this collection of short stories, suggest they were promulgated by a hypocritical, inept Almighty who in reality is just a big, happy chicken.

That’s not to say that God for Auslander doesn’t exist. God’s presence and influence in the lives of men throughout this book is never in doubt. In “Somebody Up There Likes You,” one of the best pieces in the collection, Adonai keeps floundering in his attempts to snuff out the life of a man known to us only as Bloom. “Fuck,” says God after He sets Bloom’s Volvo on fire on the New York State Thruway only to have Bloom walk away unscathed. God ultimately has to go down to earth and take care of Bloom himself, hoping to carry out a gangland-style execution. So you see, God may be a buffoon, Auslander is telling us, but you shouldn’t never doubt his power or brutality.

I only wish that Auslander in this, his literary debut, had explored this theme more thoroughly. It’s certainly a rich vein of thought, and the substance of centuries-worth of Jewish writing, but the stories in “Beware of God” are too hastily sketched to do it much justice. In fact, it would be hard to call any of the pieces in this book actual "stories." They contain nothing resembling fully fleshed-out characters. None contains a compelling narrative. And if Auslander who grew up in Spring Valley, New York, has any great insights into Orthodox Jewish culture, he certainly doesn’t share them.

Instead, what we get are conceits—a Lubavitcher students wakes up to discover he’s a goy; a monkey at the Bronx Zoo acquires self-consciousness—glibly established and then brought to facile conclusions. It’s as if Auslander, who clearly delights in the short, clipped sentence, was in too much of a hurry to get his book published to turn his thoughts into a true work of fiction.

The book does contain a number of very funny and delightfully vulgar one-liners in the tradition of Woody Allen and Philip Roth. (“The first time Shlomo heard the word blow-job, he spent a week crouched over the toilet desperately blowing at his penis like a lost hiker trying to start a fire.”) But I think a better comparison would be to Dave Eggers, though I don’t mean that as flattery. At his best Eggers’ meta-fictional stylings amount to fresh, ingenious ways of plumbing emotional depths; at their worst, they are just clever ploys at self-marketing.

Auslander’s writing style, unfortunately, consists of mostly the latter. Like Eggers, he spent several years working in the advertising industry and for all of the lofty themes he wrestles with in this tome—the limits of religious faith, the mind of God—the stories themselves wind up feeling like 30 second marketing spots. Yes, some of them might be worthy of airing during the Superbowl, but that doesn’t make them literature.

In “Waiting for Joe,” a gloss on Samuel Beckett’s classic play, two hamsters wait for their owner, Joe, to come and feed them. Joe is a stand-in for God, of course, and the rodents, while waiting for him, debate Joe’s existence. “We cannot pretend to think that we know what Joe knows and what Joe doesn’t know,” argues Doughnut, one of the hamsters, “we must only believe with all our hearts that Joe knows.” Danish, Doughnut’s comrade in the cage, counters, “I bet he doesn’t know!”

Yes, it’s funny, yes, it’s clever, but when the story ends a few pages later all Auslander has succeeded in doing is boiling one of the greatest plays ever down to a simple sound bite—human beings are like rodents, trapped in a cage while they wait around for a deity that doesn’t much care about them. This revelation may sting slightly, especially if you are religious, but it doesn’t really constitute a profundity. Auslander, if he truly has any literary ambitions, is going to have to do better than glibly parodying the masters.

What’s really missing is Auslander’s book is what’s plentiful in Beckett’s play—emotion and heart. Beckett is truly agonized about the indifference of God, and his play, accordingly, is tragicomic. But there’s is no agony or despair in this book, just parables with pat endings that you can perhaps acknowledge are insightful, but still deliver none of the satisfactions of real literature.

“Beware of God” is short, barely 200 pages, and small—the actual page size is probably about two-thirds of the typical hardcover’s. The publisher has also seen fit to leave some of the pages between the stories blank and use rather large white spaces to signal section breaks within the stories themselves. This may leave some readers clamoring for more or suspecting that Auslander, still at the very beginning of his literary career, has a great deal more to say. Most likely though, you will just wind up feeling cheated.