A Rise Again at a Decent Hour 23 24
A Strikeout With Dear and God
When Joshua Ferris's "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour" arrived in May, there was no reason to suspect it would brand history. But Mr. Ferris, forth 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 of america have been eligible.) Happily for Mr. Ferris, it is also the year he far surpassed his first two books.
"To Rise Again at a Decent Hour" also hits a high-h2o mark in the literature of dentistry, yet limited that may be. Its chief graphic symbol, Dr. Paul O'Rourke, artfully introduces himself every bit a great many things in the novel'due south opening pages. He is a New York dentist, misanthrope, Red Sox fan, strikeout with women and de facto atheist with a craving for oral sex behind grocery stores.
"It is near easily done in New Jersey, where it happens to exist legal," he confides. This sounds like a tiny homage to Philip Roth, who is certainly one of the book's sources of inspiration. Paul may not exist Jewish, but yous'd never know information technology from his obsessions — Judaism existence one of them.
Mr. Ferris ushers Paul into the volume on a caustic wave of cruelty that'south as damaging to the dentist equally it is to his patients. "A dentist is but half the doctor he claims to exist," Paul tells the reader. "That he's also half-mortician is the secret he keeps to himself." Ergo, every mouth into which he looks is already half-dead, and every patient in his Park Avenue practice is sharing the hush-hush of his or her mortality just by letting Paul run into it. Mr. Ferris has said that he chose dentistry as his protagonist'south profession considering he wanted to write a book nearly a homo who needs to salvage himself from despair (or words to that effect) and is exposed to it all mean solar day long. Along the way, the author manages to brand oral decay both terrifying and gut-bustingly funny.
As the volume begins, Paul meets a foreign, frantic patient who declares out of nowhere: "I'g an Ulm, and so are y'all!" Having no thought what an Ulm is, the dentist dismisses this nut out of hand. But the idea that he has some hush-hush heritage makes the tightly wound Paul start unraveling. It's not 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 non existence able to remember which grapheme was which on "Friends." He absently waves instruments in patients' faces while doing such things, which is a very bad mode for a dentist to come unstrung.
Epitome
His undoing is partly technological, mostly religious. The tech meltdown begins as a form of identity theft that may or may non take 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 State of israel," a play on Eretz State of israel, the broadest biblical term for that land — an ersatz Dr. Paul O'Rourke begins appearing online, first every bit a Red Sox enthusiast, and so as 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 behavior, and the faux Paul is now out proselytizing for them. The existent dentist has no selection but to examine whether his own organized religion exists and what his beliefs are.
"To Rise Again at a Decent Hour" turns Paul's history with religion into a riotous comedy of errors. A lot of it has to do with his curt, unhappy history with girls and women, to whom he has attached himself with near-religious fanaticism that scared them. "Me, I never practice 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 bear that out.
The primary ones have to practice with a Roman Cosmic girlfriend, Samantha Santacroce, whose family unit saw him every bit a stalker — and upped his condition to that of Satan once he acknowledged his atheism at the family dinner table. And with Connie, his current office assistant, who let him imagine himself equally an honorary Plotz. That is to say, part of Connie's large, Jewish family.
Though Paul has no legitimate connection to the Plotzes, he falls in dear with the whole crew. He describes himself as "a happy whore at the Plotz dinner table," even if nobody at those meals particularly returned his affection. Indeed, Connie'southward Uncle Stuart was deeply suspicious of Paul at first, telling him an unfunny joke nearly the difference betwixt a Philo-Semite and an anti-Semite: The signal of the joke is that there's only one of the ii that a Jew tin can trust. Paul is as dense nearly this as he is about everything else — until his obsession with the Ulms brings him, Uncle Stuart and a coiffure of hastily introduced secondary characters into investigating how the Ulms' roots fit amongst the Israelites' aboriginal enemies. In this branch of history, the Hebrews' destruction of the Amalekites still lingers.
In the nowadays, these hostilities have bitter resonance. In this novel, they remain as part of what originated as a detective story and much longer volume, Mr. Ferris told The Paris Review; he began writing it years ago, then put it aside for a while. The drastic cuts and inevitable confusion nevertheless create bumps in "To Rise Again at a Decent Hr," since this was never a book that had whatsoever easy narrative or philosophical destination. But its wit is then sharp, its simulated-biblical texts ("from the Cantaveticles, cantonments 25-29") so clever and its achieve so big that the messiness doesn't do significant damage. It'south an eminently worthy nominee for the Booker Prize or whatever other.
This is also the commencement novel by Mr. Ferris that really lives up to the reputation he established likewise chop-chop. It's a major achievement that far outshines the much-publicized "Then We Came to the Cease," his entertaining but weightless debut, and "The Unnamed," a baffling, downbeat aberration. Neither of those books anticipated the wonders that turn up in this one.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/books/joshua-ferriss-to-rise-again-at-a-decent-hour.html
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