Mother for Dinner

June 15, 2020
Mom's dead. Time, for a family of cannibals, to eat. Auslander has always written like he's courting a strike from a lightning bolt: His 2007 memoir, Foreskin's Lament, was a hilarious recollection of his efforts to wriggle out from under his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, and his excellent 2012 novel, Hope: A Tragedy, dared some unkind words about Anne Frank's legacy. Here, he pushes the envelope in labored and often tasteless fashion to satirize identity politics in general and religious ceremonies in particular. Its hero is Seventh Seltzer, one of 12 surviving siblings attending to the death of their mother. The Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans--not savages eager to feast on human flesh but people of faith who ritually consume family members after they die to preserve their heritage. (The Seltzer origin story involves an escape from the old country and efforts to escape the anti-Semitic wiles of Henry Ford; the Seltzer brothers were given the names First through Twelfth to make them memorable. A daughter is named Zero, because religious misogyny.) If you understand Auslander's work as the dirtbag cousin of Portnoy's Complaint, you can see the comic potential here: There's a Borscht Belt-y therapist ("I've had many patients consumed with their mothers, but I've never had a patient who actually wanted to consume her"), bleak nursery rhymes to underscore the rituals, odd bits of folklore (Jack Nicholson is a huge disappointment for not using his bully pulpit to support his "Can-Am" brethren). But the prevailing mood is so embittered that the satire is hard to enjoy much; Seventh is a book editor lamenting the mass of "Not-So-Great Something-American Novels," and this reads like an effort to burn the genre of identity-focused fiction to the ground. But replace it with what? Sarcastic fiction about squabbling siblings and parental viscera larded with sour jokes about assimilation? Tough to stomach.

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July 6, 2020
Auslander (Hope: A Tragedy) turns his taboo-shattering satiric gaze to cannibalism in this outrageous, salty take on contemporary culture. Seventh Seltzer is a New York City book editor weary of sorting through submissions for the “Not-So-Great Something-American Novel” and their increasingly niche subjects (e.g., “Gender-Neutral-Albino-Lebanese-Eritrean-American”). Seventh is particularly attuned to the “shackles” of identity, having been raised in the persecuted Cannibal-American (“Can-Am”) community, which ritualistically consumed its dead. He is the seventh of a dozen surviving children of a monstrous matriarch, Mudd, a bigoted force of nature determined to restore her diminished people to prominence. When she dies, however, many of her children have long since given up cannibalism. Yet, promised a hefty inheritance on the condition that the rite is performed, Seventh and his bickering siblings unite to tackle the grisly task. The bilious narrative trips along its grotesque way, treating readers to the picaresque history of Can-Am immigrants from an unspecified “Old Country.” While Auslander harps a bit more than necessary on the alternately constricting and comforting “boxes” of identity, and Seventh’s misanthropic epiphany about human nature is a tad facile, more effective is the riotous dissection of cultural formation and a community’s hunger for meaning. Auslander soars in enough places to make this worth the price of admission.

August 1, 2020
In his latest novel, Auslander (Hope: A Tragedy, 2012) uses his signature dark humor to brilliantly satirize tribalism in America with the story of the Seltzers, a dysfunctional group of 12 siblings attending to the death and disposal of their mother. What makes them unique is the fact that they are Cannibals. Auslander invents a backstory for Cannibal Americans, imbuing them with a unique blend of peoplehood and religion that resembles the trappings of a large, riotous Jewish family, reflecting his own Orthodox upbringing. Like many immigrant groups, after a few generations, the old Cannibal ways have been forgotten or disavowed. Their overbearing mother struggled to fend off assimilation all her life, but some of her kids have become Culturally Cannibal, including Seventh Seltzer, the dutiful son. Graphic situations abound; even the characters are revolted, while, through their often ludicrous stories, Auslander explores the sense of otherness and the value of diversity. This could be a portrait of any ethnic group that has been consumed by America, though, in this case, it's unclear who is devouring whom.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)