Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew

February 14, 2011
Ross's slight first novel is composed of brief, somber, funny tales, and begins in Ontario with the narrator's memory of his mother avenging the gas chamber deaths of her Polish relatives by shooting a prominent neo-Nazi in the head. The fantasy of the victim suddenly empowered—his mother killing Rolf Köber as he steps out of a Jewish-owned hardware store, his hardhat spinning "like a dreidl"—becomes a mournful dirge that runs through these nostalgic and grim coming-of-age anecdotes. Both the narrator, Ben, and his mother have been bullied, she as a girl by Christian children, he by an older boy who forces him to destroy the book he's reading. As Ben destroys Black Like Me he thinks, "Now was the time to fight back," a vengeance fantasy that comforts him. Ben's parents die of cancer and his older brother, Jake, loses his memory, then his mind; Ben turns to performance art, reliving childhood traumas in acts called "Stagger" and "Nerve Endings," and often rehearsing fantasies, such as Jimmy Stewart's bell tower pursuit of Kim Novak in Vertigo. These are sharply composed vignettes with a keen sense of timing and humor.

March 15, 2011
Poet and avant-garde short-story writer Ross turns to the novel to explore, among other things, notions of Jewish identity and the loss of ones parents. At first glance, this is a mystery of sorts. Ben, the narrator, is trying to figure out whether the memory he has of his late mother shooting a neo-Nazi in the head is real or imagined. Though he couldnt imagine his mother actually pulling the trigger of a gun, or even knowing how, when he remembers her doing it, then he can imagine it. But Ben is not just a middle-aged Canadian Jew reflecting on his childhood. He is also a performance artist whose professional activities have included eating a thousand donuts, building a sacred stone man out of egg rolls, and sitting in a giant tub of ketchup while people pull his hair until he screams. And so Ross novel, which is consistently minimalist and nostalgic but also variously touching, hilarious, and sad, frequently challenges (and perhaps distracts) the reader by venturing into the surreal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)