Caricatures of a New York Jew
Beware of God, by Shalom Auslander

James Topham
posted 13 March 2008

A criticism sometimes made of writers with too little material to fill their book is that they have written a short story masquerading as a novel. Shalom Auslander's collection of short stories is like a series of one-liners masquerading as fiction. And what one-liners they are. Beware of God's manic tone suggests it is fanatically unwilling to leave any comic stone unturned. If this is the case, then it is remarkable what questionable creatures it finds clinging to that stone's underside. What if God was a CEO looking for a PR firm? What if a chimp hated itself in the manner of a self-hating Jew? What if a guy named Stan discovered the original Old Testament, which frankly admitted that the Bible was nothing more than a work of fiction? What if, on reaching heaven, you discovered God was a chicken? The rhythmic patter of Auslander's conceits dying in silence against the walls of a 1980s New York comedy joint can almost be heard, which leaves me wondering how they found their way into my hands.

It isn’t that Auslander doesn’t know how to write comedy, rather that he knows all too well, is almost too well versed in the ars comedia. For example, he has grasped that repetition can be quite funny, so smatters it liberally throughout his prose. Then he sits back and waits for the laughs to come rolling in. He is as pleased with the comic potential of the oxymoron as though he'd invented the trick himself. Unlikely juxtaposition is the plat de jour every day at Auslander's table, (God saying ‘fuck’ and packing heat? What larks!), and he likes to serve it very richly sauced.

He loves the pithy, sentence-long paragraph.

Beware of God reads like it has been written by one of the programs found on the internet that creates poetry at the touch of the button. Auslander's auto-text generator has been set to book-length-Jewish-wisecrack, and it feels as though the time taken over the result would be measured better in the millisecond of a sub-atomic particle flying down optic cable than the rather longer and more considered passage of thought from head to hand. But, of course, this feeling that Auslander's prose has leapt out onto the page fully formed, the work of less than a moment, is perfectly natural, since he’s working within the realms of the perfect caricature of Jewishness. The short stories speak with the voice of the great Jewish comedians – Woody Allen, Jackie Mason, Mel Brooks - but shorn of that essential kernel of individuality that separates them from the interminable and indivisible mass of cultural clutter the overly pretentious might call the innate humour of the 'Jewish identity', when they actually mean a caricature of the New York Jew.

As such, it’s notable the two most superior stories are those where Auslander abandons his 'voice', and plays the mimic. The first is a journal of a young boy's disconnected thoughts on his Jewishness (which achieve an unusual critical self-distance from themselves), as well as on the Holocaust, comic books, and his love of Kung-fu. This voice he takes on, and the subjects he deals with, inevitably lead to a softening of the gung-ho comic tone seen elsewhere, and show a sensitive more lilting humour. It is mired only by its clunky title, ‘Holocaust Tips for Kids’. ‘Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown’ is the highlight of the collection, perhaps because it so brilliantly mimics Charles Schultz's Peanuts comic strips (and in doing so, seems to have been written by a considerably more gifted humorist). The darkness of the politics of hate collides with the whimsy of the well-loved cartoon to provoke a brittle and difficult laughter.

These well-turned forays into pastiche only throw into sharper contrast the central problem with Auslander's collection as a whole: it lacks difficulty. It is easy humour, an easy read; it is easy on the eye, and easy on the head. Most of all, its satire is easy. No doubt there is much fun to be had at the nonsenses of orthodox religion (and haven't we secularists been having fun for the last century or three), but with born-again Christianity sitting in the oval office for the last eight years and fanatical Islam posing a real and present danger in the Middle East and beyond, perhaps aiming one's cross-hairs at metropolitan Judaism is a little lazy. But, of course, Auslander's motivation isn’t to shake the ground with his criticism or thunder from the hill-top. He is one more proponent of Jewishness's cultural propensity to poke light fun at itself, a trait often remarked on, attributed to both the internal doubt of Jewish theology and the need for a defence mechanism against the Jew's persecution. His humour does not burden itself with those weightier matters, however; it is merely an iteration of a shell of the identity they forged.