By Victoria Looseleaf
This just in: Englander has won the Frank O’Connor award for this book, earning him £25000, or about $50,163.69. Click here for the details, but it’s the largest cash prize given for a collection of short stories – and we’re thrilled for the guy.
Spare. Evocative. Ultra-Jewy. And we still found ourselves loving Nathan Englander’s latest short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf). While the title decidedly takes it cues from the Raymond Carver classic, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Englander’s style and subject matter are far from the so-called “Kmart/dirty realism” movement god-fathered by Charles Bukowski and that includes cronies Carver and Cormac McCarthy.
Taking place in a seedy Times Square sex shop (that would be, of course, the Times Square of yore, those good old pre-Disneyfication days, when beach chairs on the pavement would have seemed like an LSD hallucination), the story also manages to turn back on itself. Featuring a suburban husband who plans to live out his fantasies in one of those $5 booths, this tiny tale finds our protagonist encountering not a bevy of luscious (?) nude babes, but a scenario rife, instead, with barely-clad rabbis, the man’s half-naked wife and – gulp – his mother.
Talk about a guilty conscience!
As for the title tale, we confess to having a weakness for Anne Frank (and visit her home each time we’re in Amsterdam; click here for some of our Netherlands reportage), and are in awe of Englander’s deft way with both characterization and plot in the Frank story, where two couples – one secular, one Hasidic – gab around a kitchen table. In between guzzling vodka and toking on tampon-wrappered joints (the dope is appropriated from the hostess’ son, no less), the quartet riffs on subjects ranging from Mormons converting dead Jews (oy!), including Ms. Frank (double oy!), not to mention non-Jews such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis, to Floridian neighbors liking their guns and porn.
Shades of the 60’s mesh with today’s notion of perverse psychological game-playing: “If one of you wasn’t Jewish, would you hide the other?” becomes the question du jour. (There is a similar kind of morbid joke running through Jennifer Westfeldt’s forgettable rom-com, Friends With Kids, with the lead couple continually asking each other uncomfortable questions like, ‘Slow death by cancer or swift death by car?’ Click here for our take on that flick.)
Camp Sundown also serpentines into moral ugliness: Set at an old folks’ summer camp, a comical elder-rompfest (for more on “Elder Love,” click here for our Olympia Dukakis/Zach Galafianakis post), soon descends into a sinister situation with several of the campers believing one of their own had actually been a Nazi guard at a concentration camp. A geriatric witch hunt ensues: not a pretty sight.
Englander has a fine ear for dialogue and pitch-perfect inflections that immediately transport us to such varying locales as the aforementioned Catskills, the state of Florida and 42nd Street. He also takes us to an Israeli settlement in the heart-wrenching story, Sister Hills, where bad luck, superstition and grief course through his finely etched prose. Having burst onto the scene in 1999 with For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, another short story collection chronicling the Jewish experience with equal parts wit, black humor and farce, Englander continues on the brilliant path trod by Bellow, Malamud and our long-time favorite scribe, Philip Roth (click here for some of our Roth coverage).
“What you do is tell the stories you have, as best you can,” says the wife in the formalist saga, Everything I Know About My Family On My Mother’s Side. And whether we’re defined by our stories, our ancestors, or even what we eat – Kosher pickles, anyone – with our memories also not immune to playing tricks, the 40-something Englander makes identity a profoundly moving and mystical experience.
P.S. Just in time for Passover: The New American Haggadah (Little Brown), edited by Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; click here for our Oscar coverage), with a new translation by Englander (below left), will soon be gracing Seder tables around the country. As our Jewish mother would say, “Enjoy!”
