To Rise Again at a Decent Hour Review
A Strikeout With Love and God
When Joshua Ferris's "To Rising Once again at a Decent Hour" arrived in May, there was no reason to doubtable information technology would make history. But Mr. Ferris, along with Karen Joy Fowler ("Nosotros Are All Completely Beside Ourselves"), is 1 of the kickoff 2 Americans with novels to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014. (This is the get-go twelvemonth in which writers from the U.s.a. accept been eligible.) Happily for Mr. Ferris, it is also the year he far surpassed his commencement 2 books.
"To Ascent Again at a Decent Hour" also hits a high-h2o mark in the literature of dentistry, withal express that may be. Its main character, Dr. Paul O'Rourke, artfully introduces himself every bit a neat many things in the novel's opening pages. He is a New York dentist, misanthrope, Red Sox fan, strikeout with women and de facto atheist with a peckish for oral sex behind grocery stores.
"It is most easily done in New Jersey, where information technology happens to be 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 be Jewish, only y'all'd never know it from his obsessions — Judaism being one of them.
Mr. Ferris ushers Paul into the book on a caustic wave of cruelty that's equally damaging to the dentist equally it is to his patients. "A dentist is just one-half the medico he claims to be," Paul tells the reader. "That he's besides half-mortician is the clandestine he keeps to himself." Ergo, every mouth into which he looks is already one-half-dead, and every patient in his Park Avenue practice 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 about a man who needs to save himself from despair (or words to that outcome) and is exposed to it all day long. Along the way, the writer manages to make oral decay both terrifying and gut-bustingly funny.
As the volume begins, Paul meets a strange, frantic patient who declares out of nowhere: "I'k an Ulm, and and so are you!" Having no idea what an Ulm is, the dentist dismisses this nut out of hand. Only the idea that he has some secret heritage makes the tightly wound Paul start unraveling. It's not long until he has lost his bearings then desperately that he asks a dental patient for a stool sample. He gets seriously agitated in front of another patient about not existence 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 form of identity theft that may or may not have been caused by the Ulm in the office. Soon later the Ulm'southward visit — and a section of the book related to this patient is wittily titled "Ersatz State of israel," a play on Eretz Israel, the broadest biblical term for that country — an ersatz Dr. Paul O'Rourke begins appearing online, beginning equally a Cherry-red Sox enthusiast, and then as a spouter of religious dogma. Mr. Ferris has invented a serial of theological passages on which the Ulms, living in Israel and descended from the ancient Amalekites, have based their beliefs, and the fake Paul is now out proselytizing for them. The real dentist has no choice simply to examine whether his ain organized religion exists and what his beliefs are.
"To Rise Again at a Decent Hour" turns Paul'due south history with religion into a riotous comedy of errors. A lot of it has to do with his brusque, 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 bear that out.
The main ones have to do with a Roman Catholic girlfriend, Samantha Santacroce, whose family unit saw him equally a stalker — and upped his status to that of Satan once he best-selling his atheism at the family dinner table. And with Connie, his current function banana, who let him imagine himself as 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 honey with the whole coiffure. He describes himself as "a happy whore at the Plotz dinner tabular array," fifty-fifty if nobody at those meals especially returned his affection. Indeed, Connie'southward Uncle Stuart was deeply suspicious of Paul at offset, telling him an unfunny joke about the deviation between a Philo-Semite and an anti-Semite: The betoken of the joke is that there's merely one of the two that a Jew tin can trust. Paul is equally dense almost 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 amid the Israelites' aboriginal enemies. In this branch of history, the Hebrews' devastation of the Amalekites notwithstanding lingers.
In the present, these hostilities take bitter resonance. In this novel, they remain as part of what originated every bit a detective story and much longer book, Mr. Ferris told The Paris Review; he began writing it years agone, then put it bated for a while. The drastic cuts and inevitable confusion still create bumps in "To Rise Again at a Decent 60 minutes," since this was never a volume that had any like shooting fish in a barrel narrative or philosophical destination. But its wit is so sharp, its fake-biblical texts ("from the Cantaveticles, cantonments 25-29") so clever and its achieve so big that the messiness doesn't do significant harm. It'south an eminently worthy nominee for the Booker Prize or any other.
This is too the first novel by Mr. Ferris that really lives up to the reputation he established too apace. Information technology'due south a major accomplishment that far outshines the much-publicized "Then We Came to the End," his entertaining but weightless debut, and "The Unnamed," a baffling, downbeat aberration. Neither of those books anticipated the wonders that plow 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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