Golem Song

Alan Krieger, a Jewish ER nurse and self-styled "golem of the Grand Concourse," is the antihero of Estrin's third novel, impressive for Alan's verbal pyrotechnics but finally overwhelmed by his motivating pathology. Alan's repulsiveness begins with his grotesquely obese, unhygienic and flatulent body (which is unaccountably appealing to women), but his many minor sins and shortcomings are dwarfed by his outrageous racism. Alan's musings grow increasingly ugly as his interactions with black people—in the hospital, on the subway, in the Bronx where he lives, and in Harlem where "they" live—both feed and reflect his poisonous obsession. While Estrin foregrounds various prejudices on all sides, it is suffocating to accompany Alan in his accelerating madness, as he sheds the outer skins that make his life at all tenable—his family; his girlfriends, a German psychiatrist and a Jewish social worker; his job —and hurtles into his fate over the six-month course of the novel. Like Alan, the book's 1999 veers unsteadily between millennial homeboys, Taxi Driver , Bernard Goetz and post-Holocaust Jewish anger, and Alan's ugliness can't hold it all together. (Nov.)