Golem Song

September 18, 2006
Alan Krieger, a Jewish ER nurse and self-styled "golem of the Grand Concourse," is the antihero of Estrin's third novel, impressive for Alan's verbal pyrotechnics but finally overwhelmed by his motivating pathology. Alan's repulsiveness begins with his grotesquely obese, unhygienic and flatulent body (which is unaccountably appealing to women), but his many minor sins and shortcomings are dwarfed by his outrageous racism. Alan's musings grow increasingly ugly as his interactions with black people—in the hospital, on the subway, in the Bronx where he lives, and in Harlem where "they" live—both feed and reflect his poisonous obsession. While Estrin foregrounds various prejudices on all sides, it is suffocating to accompany Alan in his accelerating madness, as he sheds the outer skins that make his life at all tenable—his family; his girlfriends, a German psychiatrist and a Jewish social worker; his job —and hurtles into his fate over the six-month course of the novel. Like Alan, the book's 1999 veers unsteadily between millennial homeboys, Taxi Driver
, Bernard Goetz and post-Holocaust Jewish anger, and Alan's ugliness can't hold it all together.

November 15, 2006
The protagonist of this zany New York Jewish comic novel is emergency nurse Alan Krieger, a sick, delusional, angry screwball trying to save Jewish America from anti-Semitism. He therefore invokes the image of the golem, a clay creature that protected the Jewish community of 16th-century Prague; only Kreiger is a fat would-be golem intent on saving his world from dire consequences that only he perceives. Estrin ("Insect Dreams"), a writer, cellist, and activist living in Burlington, VT, has written a quirky story that will not be to every reader's delight. There is much shtick on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, where he lives with his mother, including scenes of a Passover seder with nods to Philip Roth. Other maniacal humorinvolving his shiksa girlfriend Ursula or Kristallnacht on the Golem Heightsleft this reviewer cold; Jewish humor so deprecating isn't necessarily funny. For collections where Estrin's works are popular.Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, MD

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2006
In his edgy and satirical novels, Estrin hijacks historical figures and impudently improvises on the works of his literary superiors. In " Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa "(2002), Estrin riffs on Kafka; here he commandeers John Kennedy O'Toole's " A "Confederacy of Dunces. Estrin's latest vitriolic tale is set in New York in 1999 and stars a fat, angry, and gross Jewish registered nurse named Alan Kreiger. Aggressively pedantic and manipulative, Alan lives in filth with a boa constrictor and juggles two girlfriends (what they see in him is beyond comprehension), one a German psychiatrist, the other a Jewish social worker. Confronted by violence, madness, and hate in the emergency room and anti-Semitism on the street, Alan is driven over the edge. Estrin's abrasive antihero's commitment to battling false messiahs is morbidly compelling, and his logorrhea is occasionally dazzling. As Estrin raises a host of tough moral questions, drags philosopher Martha Nussbaum into the unsavory proceedings, and tinkers with the story of the golem, his mind-bending humor is at once intellectual and ribald.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)