The Laws of Return

The existential angst of assimilated Jews in America is the theme of Stracher's fiercely honest, caustically funny and ironic first novel. Blond, blue-eyed Colin Stone (""my name sounds like an intestinal disorder'') grows up in suburbia, the grandson of Holocaust-haunted, Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants and the son of a scientist father and a mother who pursues a Ph.D in comparative literature while raising three children. Determined to join the American melting pot, Colin's parents have shed their religion and traditions, unwittingly casting their children into a spiritual void. At the same time, they send conflicting messages: to assuage their guilt, Colin is forced to attend Hebrew school to prepare for a bar mitzvah. Obsessed by the sense of a tragic history but denying that he is part of it, Colin develops friendships with other spiritual and cultural misfits, participating in encounters that often verge on the farcical but capture the tension of secular Jews walking the tightrope between assimilation and isolation. Stracher has a sharp, irreverent eye for the hypocrisies and contradictions of his protagonist's life, which he describes in prose that snaps with staccato one-liners and resonates with insight. He follows Colin's belated coming of age through a series of unfortunate relationships with unattainable women (a set piece on Colin's first date is hilarious), college in New England (transparently Amherst) and Harvard Law School, followed by virtual bondage in a white-shoe Manhattan law firm where Colin hides his religious background from the anti-Semitic boss. It's not until his endearingly neurotic non-Jewish girlfriend accuses him of being ""filled with self-hatred'' that Colin can move from passivity to affirmation, cast off his ambiguous identity and declare that he is a Jew. In Colin's insistently mocking voice, Stracher writes first-class social comedy. Author tour. (Oct.)