GUIDED TOURS OF HELL, by Francine Prose (Metropolitan. $23). These two buoyant novellas describing dark nights of the soul in Prague and Paris are among Prose’s most winning works. In the title story, a nebbishy American playwright lugs all his petty miseries along on a tour of a concentration camp. Death-camp culture doesn’t normally inspire satire, but Prose mingles the horrific, the funny and the poignant with perfect pitch. “Three Pigs in Five Days” tracks another tourist as she searches Paris for clues to her emotional disarray. Next time you pack for a trip, take these maps to the psyche with you.
THE HUNDRED BROTHERS, by Donald Antrim (Crown. $21). The family is, at its most basic, a matter of numbers–you plus some other people. Multiplying that idea out to, well, not its logical but certainly a fruitful conclusion, novelist Donald Antrim creates a clan of 100 sons, ranging from Hiram, at 93 the eldest, to Zachary, the giant; Pierce, the “designer of radically unbuildable buildings,” and so on, through four sets of twins. They all gather one fateful night in the ancestral mansion to find the urn that holds their father’s ashes, but their reunion is in fact spent on unsettled scores and petty rivalries–the tragicomic glue, in short, that’s been the stuff of family lore since Cain and Abel. Numerically and literarily, Antrim takes the tradition to new heights.
title: “Book Marks” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-31” author: “Cheryl Barbour”
MIRIAM’S KITCHEN by Elizabeth Ehrlich (Viking. $23.95). Elizabeth Ehrlich didn’t go looking for her roots; they came looking for her, while she cooked. Mysteriously, knives and cutting boards and wooden spoons began to recoil in her hands if she used them interchangeably for milk and meat. ““I didn’t want a kosher kitchen,’’ she writes. ““But it’s when you begin to think of your kitchen as unkosher, however defiantly, that the roller-coaster ride begins.’’ Soon she’s in her mother-in-law Miriam’s kitchen, watching Miriam fry the onions for Sabbath egg salad, grate the potatoes for latkes and sprinkle a little cocoa in the butter cake–hesitantly, because her mother liked it plain. In this wonderful book, Ehrlich describes a growing commitment, not just to a set of laws but to the women who came before her. ““The ancient and timeless matzo ball?’’ she muses in the kitchen one Passover. ““Yes, that’s my religion.’’ Ehrlich includes some enticing recipes here, but the real attraction is the beautifully nuanced way she reflects on domestic truth.
title: “Book Marks” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-17” author: “Alice Pond”
DAVID GATES
MALCOLM JONES JR.
