Blood Libels

Fitfully funny tale of the miserable boyhood and early manhood of an Anglo-Jewish intellectual by the author of Hearts of Gold, 1982 (Somerset Maugham Award winner) and Bed Bugs, 1983. While the details are new, the Weltanshauung is as stale as yesterday's challah: Portnoy's complaint, redux. Both Sinclair and his fictional counterpart, one Jacob Silkstone, were born in 1948; while Sinclair is literary editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Silkstone holds the same post at the fictional Jewish Voice. Let's hope Sinclair's life hasn't been half as deranged as Silkstone's. Lusting after Helga, a buxom German maid, the hapless young protagonist instead watches her make it in the men's room (in the middle of his bar mitzvah, no less!) with randy Rabbi Nathan; this incident and similiar ego-blows turn Silkstone into "the locus of a civil war between mind and body." In short order, he produces a novel that no one reads, marries his publisher's daughter, loses the ability to write ("scriptophobia"), breaks out in hives ("dermagraphia"), is cuckolded by poets and diplomats, accidentally triggers the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, flies to Jerusalem in pursuit of the ravishing Hannah Ben-Toy, watches from afar as she caresses herself with a sheaf of his writings ("the freest review my work has ever received"), learns that his son may not be his son, and finally regresses to childhood posturings in his parents' home while anti-Semites rampage through England. There, in a curare-tipped parting joke, Silkstone discovers that his Jewish angst is less than skin-deep: he is in truth a Gentile, adopted at birth. The jokes, almost all derived from pouring salt into wounds, fizzle as often as they sizzle. The characters are perverse, the sex graphic, the Jewish/anti-Semite opposition too trite to sustain interest. But the book does zip along, the plot twisting in and around itself like a Moebius strip on acid. One day, if he can shake the urge to be a clone of Philip Roth, Sinclair may write a whiz of a book. (Kirkus Reviews)