Feh: A Memoir

Novelist Auslander (Mother for Dinner) delivers a poignant if scattered study of the religious guilt he incurred while growing up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Rockland County, N.Y. Titled after the Yiddish word for disgust, the book hinges on Auslander’s attempts to shake the conviction, drilled into him from childhood, that human beings are “totally, irredeemably feh.” That sense of divine judgment, which plagued him through marital problems with his wife, Orli, financial struggles, and professional disappointments, culminated in a recent suicide attempt that Auslander dispassionately recounts near the beginning of the memoir. After he recovered, Auslander attempted to shed his fatalistic worldview on behalf of Orli and his two sons. In episodic chapters, he recounts trying to smile through Super Bowl parties, revisits guilty memories of watching porn as an adolescent, and talks with a Christian pastor in L.A. about God’s judgment. Though he never quite manages to come out the other side of his shame, he learns to coexist with it, and realizes that a “constant refrain of self-contempt and derision becomes self-fulfilling at some point.”Auslander’s gallows humor won’t be for everyone, and the account’s lack of resolution undercuts some of its impact, but the glimmer of hope coursing through the narrative keeps it alive. The result is an often-brutal, sometimes-rewarding journey out of the darkness. Agent: Jody Hotchkiss, Hotchkiss & Assoc. (July)