The Pinch

April 20, 2015
Like much of his previous work, Stern’s latest is a fabulist Yiddishkeit saga set in the Pinch, a historic Jewish neighborhood in Memphis, Tenn. This time, “the book and the place are one,” as the protagonist, Lenny Sklarew, discovers a tome titled The Pinch: A History, in which he himself is a character. The book’s author, Muni Pinsker—writing from when the Pinch’s past, present, and future collapsed into a single magical day—supposedly foresaw the actions Lenny, the sole future resident of the Pinch. Once Lenny begins to read, chapters alternate between Muni’s chronicle and Lenny’s first-person 1960s reality, the latter of which includes dealing hallucinogenics, working at the aptly named Book Asylum, and chasing after folklorist Rachel Ostrofsky. While Muni’s characters escape from czarist Russia, encounter Yellow Fever and the KKK, and open businesses in America—not to mention swapping human children for goblins, battling Leviathan fish, and siring children with ghosts—Lenny’s generation deals with civil rights and the Vietnam War. The suspense of learning whether the book’s predictions for Lenny’s future come true propels the narrative forward, and Stern’s rich and rampant imagination seeps into every page. The endings (which are doubled because of the alternating structure) are the novel’s strongest point and will provoke thought long after the final page.

Starred review from April 1, 2015
The Pinch-for many years in the early 20th century a predominantly Jewish section of Memphis-has found its Whitman and its Faulkner in Stern, who's written a stylistically effusive, verbally extravagant novel. In the late 1960s, Lenny Sklarew is living...well, not much of a life. He works in Avrom Slutsky's bookstore, The Book Asylum, deals drugs on the side, and spends time listening to his favorite band, Velveeta and the Psychopimps. But then two things happen that change his life: he meets Rachel Ostrofsky in a bar and finds a book by Muni Pinsker called The Pinch: A History in Avrom's bookstore. Rachel is a folklorist who came to Memphis "to research the roots of the Southern Jewish community," and she's of course fascinated by the Pinch. And in a metafictional trope, Lenny finds out that he's a character in Pinsker's book. From here, Stern's narrative gets really complex, as he bounces back and forth between the events in Lenny's life, the early history of the Pinch, and supposed excerpts from Pinsker's history. One of the main strands of Stern's multilayered narrative involves Pinsker's arrival in Memphis from Siberia in 1911, a journey financed by his uncle Pinchas Pin (nee Pinsker), a shopkeeper in the Pinch, and his wife, Katie. Shortly after his arrival, Pinsker meets and falls in love with Jenny Bashrig (aka "La Funambula," a tightrope walker), and they consummate their relationship in the branches of an iconic oak tree. The action unfolds against visits by the Ku Klux Klan and, by the end of the novel, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Audacious, hilarious, unabashed fiction.

Starred review from May 15, 2015
We've been to the Pinch, the Jewish section of Memphis, Tennessee, with Stern before in his short story collection, The Book of Mischief (2012). In his big, rangy, saturated, antic new novel, a Pynchonian tragicomedy, he tells the neighborhood's fabulist story in two time frames. The Pinch is abjectly derelict in 1968, but Lenny Sklarew hangs on, peddling drugs, working in a used-book store, falling in love, and succumbing to the spell of a strange book, The Pinch, in which he is a character. This is the portal to the past, where we meet Muni Pinsker, who survives Siberia and arrives in Memphis in 1911, just in time to see a rabbi turn writhing snakes into walking sticks. The Pinch is a tumultuous district rife with subsistence retail, metaphysical mischief, gossip, unlikely romance, and accord between Jews and African Americans because of the Ku Klux Klan. In Lenny's time, Martin Luther King Jr. is on his fatal journey to Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers. With a motley cast, including blues musicians, a folklorist, an ogre, levitating Hasidim, and a limping tightrope walker, Stern, an ebullient maestro of words and mayhem, wonder and conscience, orchestrates a cacophonous, whirling, gritty, tender, time-warping saga that encompasses a cavalcade of horror, stubborn love, cosmic slapstick, burlesque humor, and a scattering of miracles.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)