The Recurring Problem

...In the equally frustrating bureaucratic entanglements of protagonists in novels by Kafka and Dickens, Englander’s evident models, the ongoing nightmare of officialdom overwhelms its fictional victims without putting off readers...

...I wish you’d never been born,” father replies...

...In the story “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” from his prior book, a Waspish businessman is suddenly struck Jewish...

...Read Irish novelist Colm Tóibín’s English-language take on the Argentine era of the generals, The Story of the Night (1996), to get an idea of what a plain, precise style can do with this stuff...

...Protagonists Kaddish and Lillian Poznan are worried about their son Pato...

...And after her . . . just check your Sunday book review...

...Recently Curtis Sittenfeld had her moment with Prep...

...A military junta takes power and people start to disappear...

...Englander employs a pleasingly humorous tone and can create conflicts between characters that are both elemental and particular...

...To kidnap the innocents, to take revenge on them—we’ve seen enough of that in this century...

...A person could retire off such a thing...

...Englander makes the connection for us if we haven’t made it ourselves...

...Meanwhile Lillian is shown rushing back to the titular “Ministry of Special Cases,” despite having sworn she would not return there...

...For some reason the son goes along...

...He was instantly established...

...Brett Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Jonathan Safran Foer...

...Less fully achieved than Jay McInerney’s zeitgeisty novel Bright Lights, Big City, less inventive than Dave Eggers’ watershed memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Englander’s book nevertheless got him into the club...

...Englander gets himself in trouble when he seems to strain for profundity or a semi-Biblical grandeur, often both at the same time, usually at the end of the short sections that make up his chapters: “How true is anything that only one man believes...

...And one bound to bring to mind the Holocaust...

...That terrible industry as a Jewish business was by then 20 years shut down,” describes the whoring and pimping done by Kaddish’s forebears...

...Sometimes the books themselves, usually story collections or first novels but also memoirs (however fictionalized), actually show promise...

...It is more than a matter of sophomore jinx...

...A few can even be read, without strain, all the way through...

...What happens after that has been the recurring problem...

...Perhaps early praise encourages attempts at overt grandiosity...

...Those ultimate, irredeemable parentchild curses are uttered: “I wish you were dead,” son tells father...

...He is a student of Leftist bent, Jewish, unwilling to get rid of incriminating books and pamphlets, and unable to curb his appetite for timeworn teenage pursuits such as rock concerts and drugs...

...The phenom-marketing machine is apparently not built with the idea of sustaining a writing career...

...He has a talent for making physical activities (nose jobs Lillian and Kaddish receive) correspond to thematic notions (erasure of the past, assimilation) without ponderousness...

...Jews in Argentina during a time of persecution and purgation—not a choice without ambition...

...The stories stuck to the issues at hand (a roundup of Soviet writers...

...The Ministry of Special Cases is full of characters unexpectedly acting contrary to logic or their own natures—and the nagging worry is that, rather than storytelling magic, what is at work is a lack of authorial control...

...Nothing like a novel to knock a man out...

...The description of a soldier’s apparent ability to keep up with a racing cruiser is a forgivable lapse—we get the idea—and the police car’s implied ability to look, in passing, at pedestrians could have been corrected by omitting the comma or adding a driver...

...McInerney has managed to keep himself afloat, though it has sometimes seemed that nothing but his social life has approached his first book’s noteworthiness...

...There were good stories in Englander’s debut collection, Fo r the Relief of Unbearable Urges...

...The syntax (“who always had for her a gift”), the dialogue (“I’ll pay you to unmake a wedding, same as to do”) and the subject (a matchmaker...

...The police car passed, and then the soldier, without even a look their way...

...Englander is a not-always-convincing fabulist...

...The endless plans these two come up with and discard in their attempts to retrieve their son lead to fraught encounters with various Argentine bigwigs and clerks that soon come to feel repetitive and narratively flat...

...The suddenness never quite convinces, but the ripple effect of the conversion evokes a glee independent of the initial credibility problem...

...The novel is weighed down by its subject matter...

...At a crucial point deep in the novel, for example, when Pato has disappeared and Lillian and Kaddish cannot agree on what to do about it, Kaddish ends up sleeping on the floor of the temple wondering if he will ever reconcile with his wife, even though there has been no mention of their having separated...

...The neighbors heard nothing, no matter how loud...

...Instead of a sense of constructing an opus, with necessary dips and setbacks (think Philip Roth’s dour When She Was Good and torturous The Great American Novel, the former predating, the latter following the lightning bolt that was Portnoy’s Complaint), we have heightened awareness and inevitable disappointment—and no real expectation of better things to come...

...There has since been no shortage of first-book phenoms to track...

...A fingertip is chopped off during a graveside fight...

...If, based on the reception of his first book or even on a reading of it, you have picked up Englander’s second offering, you probably have already discovered that an impressive debut does not make a writer great...

...felt a bit worn, but the work was admirably crafted...

...Not that The Ministry of Special Cases is bad...

...Kaddish insists his son accompany him during his nighttime duties...

...A cruiser raced in their direction and behind it ran a soldier on foot...

...The instant success occasionally granted to young writers these days, initiated by publicity juggernauts and (one wants to believe) some innate value in their early efforts, will assuredly not result in bodies of work as full and enduring as Goethe’s, and will hopefully not become a source of haunting persecution either...

...YOU CAN’T HELP wondering if a first novelist like Englander, shorn of the earlier comparisons to Bellow and Roth and Joyce and Cheever, might have been more careful and, even better, carefree in preparing his second book...

...But when Lillian pinches “her biceps as hard as she could” to make sure she is not in the middle of a nightmare, we have left the land of the forgivable and are firmly in the world of the trite and untrue...

...It is nice to think some good books will follow, though...

...The Novel is set in mid-’70s Argentina...

...Been reading the same two pages of this one for a year,” one distinctly nonliterary type tells Kaddish...

...Disappearances, beatings, torture, murder—these require writerly tools not in evidence...

...Still, hats off to him for enduring...

...Last year there was Marisha Pessl...

...With a nose like that, you could qualify for disability...

...Kaddish, somewhat incredibly, makes a living chiseling family names off gravestones in the criminal side of the Jewish cemetery, so that well-to-do Jews won’t have to worry about their sordid heritage...

...If Werther had been my brother and I had killed him, I could scarcely have been so persecuted by his avenging sorrowful ghost,” Goethe wrote later in life about his notorious early novel’s lasting impact on him...

...Goethe’s semiautobiographical cri de coeur created a fashion craze, provoked a spate of copycat suicides, and engendered an interest in the author’s private life that he ultimately found regrettable...

...Thus among publishers’ marketing ploys there appears to be an avid desire to produce the next young star, with much care devoted to prepublication buzz and book jacket photos...

...He then spent a brief moment as the new name on the ever-lengthening list of literary wunderkinder that might be said to have started with Goethe, whose publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther quickly made him famous...

...the escape of a congregation of Jews from the German extermination machine), taking interesting turns along the way...

...He can be selfdeprecating, too, in a sly way...

...He has a nicely tempered sense of humor (when Pato refuses to get his prominent nose fixed, Kaddish tells him: “You shouldn’t even consider it...

...For one perfect moment the book was on f ire and did not burn...

...The father-son battles in the opening half of Ministry hit Lawrentian heights...

...It is about as much as the author’s syntactically inverted, Yiddish-hued English can handle...

...Englander loses his way not only over the course of chapters but within paragraphs...

...As mergers, acquisitions, corporate concerns for bottom lines, and modern marketing increasingly encroach on publishing’s once sedate, family-owned “houses,” the wunderkind phenomenon has, it seems, become something worth cashing in on...

...The gentle, admonishing, humorously anachronistic narrative stance is ill suited to the heavy and heavily foregrounded material...

...Police sirens hit them and the two froze in place...

...You channel the grand tradition of Jewish diplomacy: Never acknowledge catastrophe until it’s done...

...Reviewed by Mark Kamine Contributor, “TLS,” New York “Times Book Review,” the “Believer” EIGHT YEARS AGO, Nathan Englander published a book of stories to great acclaim...