The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff

April 12, 2010
Epstein (Fabulous Small Jews
) delivers a faulty collection of 14 relentlessly similar, uninspired tales. Mostly about Chicago Jews—particularly male intellectual Chicago Jews—these stories meditate on the perceived faults of others while trumpeting the achievements of the narrators (Yale and comfortable tenure appear more than once). This restrictive formula grows old fast, as do the dismissive and stereotypical treatment secondary characters get: an Irish-American who reeks of beer, a feminist who talks “exclusively about herself and the difficulty of her adolescent menstrual cycles,” and Mexican teenagers who “walked by in baggy jeans low on the hips, unlaced gym shoes, and baseball caps worn backwards.” While this could be read as humor, stock characters don’t leave much room for introspection, development, or nuance. The contrived prose and characters reveal Epstein, a successful nonfiction writer, to be out of his element.

Starred review from March 15, 2010
Achingly beautiful stories of growing old, searching for meaning and facing death.

Epstein (In a Cardboard Belt!, 2007, etc.) creates his characters with deft strokes. The story that gives the collection its title is one of the author's most typical, as well as one of his best. Three years earlier the somewhat Prufrockian Dr. A. Jerome Minkoff had lost his wife to Lou Gehrig's disease, and at a fundraiser for ALS he meets Larissa Friedman, a rich and glamorous widow in similar circumstances. They fall into an energetic affair, and for the first time since his wife's death Minkoff finds himself contemplating marriage. Larissa has much to offer, especially a gorgeous home in Los Angeles and megabucks—"All the happiness that money could buy." But at a deep, intuitive level, Minkoff senses this relationship is not going to work. The good doctor is typical of Epstein's anti-heroes: elderly, lonely, sensitive and looking to make decisions with a modicum of moral integrity. In"The Philosopher and the Checkout Girl," for instance, a retired professor of analytical philosophy finds a connection with a checkout girl (albeit one pushing 50) that he never experienced with his former academic colleagues. In a neo-Jamesian epiphany the professor belatedly discovers that"he had never known the pleasure of guileless behavior, of saying precisely what he felt and acting on those feelings. He had lived his life at a second, perhaps a third, remove."

Epstein writes with intelligence, wit and flair—highly recommended.

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Starred review from May 15, 2010
Epstein writes nonfiction of stinging clarity, thrust, and wit, while his fiction tends to be at once funny, tender, and trenchant. But in his newest short story collection, Epstein is at his skewering best, audaciously combining his incisive take on Jewish life in Chicago with acerbic views of academia and, most arrestingly, the writing life. The titles nod to T. S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a tip-off, even though the story itself, a knockout, is about a doctor who lost his beloved wife and is now being aggressively courted by an extremely wealthy widow. Further piquant inquiries into what truly matters in life follow as Epsteins skeptical characters weigh art and money, integrity and fame, love and ambition. He considers the arrogance and sacrifice of writers in stories of spiky complexity and outrageous satire, including My Brother Eli, which chronicles the shenanigans of a Saul Bellowesque figure, and Beyond the Pale, a tale of an elderly Yiddish writer, his tenacious wife, and a young, railroaded translator. As cutting as his stories of the literary world are, Epstein is also a master at capturing the happenstance of urban life and at dramatizing the bewildering fact that we understand so little about each other. Perfectly executed, bold, and unforgettable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)