It Won't Always Be This Great

September 8, 2014
Given that Mehlman is a former writer for Seinfeld, it's no surprise to find his first novel powered by an irresistibly irreverent tone and relentless observational humor about the mundaneness of everyday life. The unnamed narrator, a lovable but neurotic 51-year-old podiatrist who's still in love with his wife after decades of marriage, experiences a brief moment of rage while walking home through his largely Jewish Long Island town during Shabbos. After stumbling over a bottle of horseradish and twisting his ankle, he hurls the bottle through the window of a clothing store. The unnoticed act of vandalism takes on new meaning when the store's owner, one of the town's more prominent Orthodox Jews, suspects that it's an act of anti-Semitism and wants the powers that be to prosecute it as a federal hate crime. The story becomes exponentially more complicated (and comical) after a bigoted artist is arrested for the crime and the FBI is brought in to investigate. Equal parts moral dilemma, subtle social commentary, and journey of self-discovery, Mehlman's tale of a man forced outside the comfort zone of his "respectable, decent, low-impact, relaxed-fit, gluten-free world" is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving.

Starred review from September 1, 2014
After a sequence of events leaves him walking home after work, a Long Island podiatrist stumbles over an object on the ground and hurts his ankle. In a moment of anger, he hurls the object, a small jar of horseradish, through the window of a clothing store. So begins our narrator's quirky odyssey into the depths of his own psyche. This very entertaining novel (it should be entertaining: it's written by a longtime Seinfeld writer) is a shining example of nonsequential storytelling; the narrator is relating the events of the incident and its aftermath to a friend, but chronologically he's all over the map, as one thing sparks a memory of something else, and the narrator is suddenly relating an episode that took place years earlier. This isn't as difficult to follow as it might soundin fact, as our podiatrist digs deeper into his story, we begin to see its various threads reaching back into time and realize how the past is connecting to the present. The book is full of questions that don't get answered right away (even the identity of the person to whom the narrator is speaking is clouded in mystery), and it features, like life itself, a story that seems simple enough until you really get into it. This is Mehlman's first novel, and it's wonderful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)