To Rise Again at a Decent Hour Review New Yorker
A Strikeout With Dearest and God
When Joshua Ferris's "To Ascent Over again at a Decent Hour" arrived in May, there was no reason to suspect it would make history. But Mr. Ferris, along with Karen Joy Fowler ("Nosotros Are All Completely Beside Ourselves"), is one of the first ii Americans with novels to be shortlisted for the Human Booker Prize in 2014. (This is the first year in which writers from the United States take been eligible.) Happily for Mr. Ferris, it is as well the twelvemonth he far surpassed his commencement two books.
"To Rise Over again at a Decent Hour" likewise hits a high-water mark in the literature of dentistry, still express that may be. Its main character, Dr. Paul O'Rourke, artfully introduces himself as a not bad many things in the novel's opening pages. He is a New York dentist, misanthrope, Ruby-red Sox fan, strikeout with women and de facto atheist with a peckish for oral sexual practice behind grocery stores.
"It is almost easily done in New Jersey, where it happens to be legal," he confides. This sounds similar a tiny homage to Philip Roth, who is certainly one of the book'south sources of inspiration. Paul may not be Jewish, simply you lot'd never know it from his obsessions — Judaism being one of them.
Mr. Ferris ushers Paul into the book on a caustic moving ridge of cruelty that'due south as damaging to the dentist as information technology is to his patients. "A dentist is only one-half the doctor he claims to be," Paul tells the reader. "That he's also half-mortician is the hush-hush he keeps to himself." Ergo, every mouth into which he looks is already half-dead, and every patient in his Park Avenue exercise is sharing the secret of his or her mortality just by letting Paul see it. Mr. Ferris has said that he chose dentistry every bit his protagonist's profession because he wanted to write a book nigh a man who needs to save himself from despair (or words to that effect) and is exposed to it all 24-hour interval long. Along the way, the author manages to make oral decay both terrifying and gut-bustingly funny.
As the book begins, Paul meets a strange, frantic patient who declares out of nowhere: "I'thou an Ulm, and so are you!" Having no idea what an Ulm is, the dentist dismisses this nut out of hand. Simply the idea that he has some secret heritage makes the tightly wound Paul start unraveling. It's non long until he has lost his bearings then badly that he asks a dental patient for a stool sample. He gets seriously agitated in front of another patient about not being able to remember which character was which on "Friends." He absently waves instruments in patients' faces while doing such things, which is a very bad way for a dentist to come unstrung.
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His undoing is partly technological, mostly religious. The tech meltdown begins as a grade of identity theft that may or may non accept been caused by the Ulm in the office. Soon after the Ulm's visit — and a section of the book related to this patient is wittily titled "Ersatz Israel," a play on Eretz Israel, the broadest biblical term for that state — an ersatz Dr. Paul O'Rourke begins appearing online, kickoff as a Cherry Sox enthusiast, and then equally a spouter of religious dogma. Mr. Ferris has invented a series of theological passages on which the Ulms, living in Israel and descended from the ancient Amalekites, have based their beliefs, and the simulated Paul is now out proselytizing for them. The real dentist has no selection only to examine whether his own faith exists and what his behavior are.
"To Rise Once again at a Decent Hour" turns Paul's history with religion into a riotous one-act of errors. A lot of it has to practice with his short, unhappy history with girls and women, to whom he has attached himself with near-religious fanaticism that scared them. "Me, I never do anything romantically that doesn't involve blood, fever and the potential for incarceration," he says, and goes on to tell a series of stories that comport that out.
The chief ones have to exercise with a Roman Catholic girlfriend, Samantha Santacroce, whose family saw him as a stalker — and upped his status to that of Satan once he acknowledged his atheism at the family dinner table. And with Connie, his electric current office assistant, who allow him imagine himself equally an honorary Plotz. That is to say, office of Connie's large, Jewish family.
Though Paul has no legitimate connection to the Plotzes, he falls in love with the whole crew. He describes himself every bit "a happy whore at the Plotz dinner table," fifty-fifty if nobody at those meals especially returned his amore. Indeed, Connie'south Uncle Stuart was deeply suspicious of Paul at get-go, telling him an unfunny joke about the divergence between a Philo-Semite and an anti-Semite: The point of the joke is that in that location'south only one of the 2 that a Jew tin trust. Paul is as dumbo about this as he is about everything else — until his obsession with the Ulms brings him, Uncle Stuart and a crew of hastily introduced secondary characters into investigating how the Ulms' roots fit among the Israelites' ancient enemies. In this co-operative of history, the Hebrews' destruction of the Amalekites still lingers.
In the present, these hostilities take biting resonance. In this novel, they remain every bit function of what originated every bit a detective story and much longer book, Mr. Ferris told The Paris Review; he began writing it years ago, then put it bated for a while. The drastic cuts and inevitable confusion still create bumps in "To Rising Again at a Decent 60 minutes," since this was never a book that had any easy narrative or philosophical destination. But its wit is then sharp, its fake-biblical texts ("from the Cantaveticles, cantonments 25-29") and then clever and its reach and then large that the messiness doesn't practice significant damage. It'southward an eminently worthy nominee for the Booker Prize or whatsoever other.
This is also the starting time novel by Mr. Ferris that really lives up to the reputation he established as well quickly. It's a major achievement that far outshines the much-publicized "And then Nosotros Came to the Stop," his entertaining but weightless debut, and "The Unnamed," a baffling, downbeat aberration. Neither of those books anticipated the wonders that turn upwardly in this ane.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/books/joshua-ferriss-to-rise-again-at-a-decent-hour.html
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