When Life Falls, It Falls Upside Down

Beginning in 1924, this autobiographical novel takes an unsentimental and sometimes acidic look at growing up Jewish and impoverished in the Bronx. After Leon Mehler's father drowned in a freak accident in the Bronx reservoir, his mother Rose supported her three young children by peddling a variety of goods and taking in questionable boarders. Leon chronicles his turbulent adolescence in a series of sharply etched vignettes, hilariously detailing graphic, highly erotic dreams. We see his City College classmates, burning idealists who make a mish-mash of leftist ideology, learn of his uneven career, ranging from freight-hopping across the nation to pick crops, to a love-smitten year at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. In painful and bleakly comic detail, he traces, through his twice-weekly visits, his mother's decline into delusion and paranoia at an old age home. Leon's recollections are evocative, unblinking and absorbing. (July)