A Stranger on the Planet

November 8, 2010
Schwartz's debut novel is the touching and funny account of Seth Shapiro's dysfunctional but lovable family beginning in 1969, six years after his parents' traumatic divorce. His father starts a new family, but Seth and his twin sister and younger brother are left to deal with their unstable mother, Ruth—a devoted but self-absorbed woman who relies on her children for emotional support, picks the wrong men, and is always putting her foot in her mouth. Seth's adolescent embarrassment over his mother is both comical and uncomfortably familiar, and Schwartz captures these feelings with self-effacing, caustic wit. Scarred by his childhood, Seth struggles for decades with intimate relationships, and when he finally marries Molly, "the love of his life," he can't appreciate her. A tragedy brings the family back together, and amid the dry humor and the raw pain, there are some truly beautiful images. But while the balance between wit and emotion is sharply on point for most of the novel, the final third drifts into melancholy. While this does reflect Seth's newfound ability to communicate his emotions, it feels overwrought and out of sync from the sound narrative of the book's beginnings.

October 15, 2010

A Jewish boy from a fractured family learns the meaning of forgiveness and understanding in a seriocomic epic that takes him from New Jersey to Chicago to Cambridge, Mass.

Schwartz's first novel is solidly entrenched in the tradition of Jewish coming-of-age fiction. The book opens in 1969, when 12-year-old Seth Shapiro's mentally shaky mother Ruth, still furious that her wealthy medical-researcher husband left her for a French postdoctoral student, marries a loser she just met at a Catskills resort. The marriage, a quick flop, is one of numerous domestic disasters with which the perpetually alienated Seth and his intimately close twin sister Sarah must contend. They also share the unsettling experience of hearing a fat, married lawyer have sex with their mother during a visit to his Long Island summer home. When they visit their father at his Cape Cod home with their younger brother Seamus, he treats them only slightly less coldly than his uptight French wife, who brings out upstart Seth's knack for getting in trouble—or skirting it. As a student, he achieves early success with a story largely lifted from the work of Saul Bellow, and ends up for the wrong reasons at the University of Chicago Divinity School. As well-written and thoughtful as it is, the book never overcomes a certain secondhand quality itself. There's nothing especially fresh about Seth or his story, or Schwartz's treatment of fiction as a curative for real life. The comic touches are never more than amusing, and its serious themes never more than lightly affecting, or sentimental. Seth's sexual encounters—with an all-knowing teen who schools him in oral sex under the stars, a smart Jewish girl who turns out to be lesbian, an auburn-haired gentile who pursues him after seeing his standup act—are entertaining. But they seem based more in male fantasy than fictional reality.           

An enjoyable but lightweight novel about a Jewish boy's awakening.

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December 1, 2010
Seth Shapiro is a keeper of memories. He remembers how his mothers fleshy back looked when she entreated him to fasten her brassiere when he was a kid. He remembers the night Neil Armstong walked on the moon because it coincided with his first sexual experience. A Stranger on the Planet is an endearing novel of memories that brings to life the quirky, comedic, and sometimes tragic life of the Shapiros. Reminiscent of the character of Kevin Arnold in the 1990s sitcom, The Wonder Years, Seth is awkward and self-conscious, interested in girls and embarrassed by his family. As he develops from adolescence to adulthood, he struggles to find himself, first dating a lesbian and then marrying outside of his Jewish faith. Finally, he must reconcile with himself and his family, and the flood of old memories and feelings cannot be held back. Recommend this moving coming-of-age novel to readers of Adam Langers Crossing California (2004) and Joshua Braffs Peep Show (2010).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)