Marc Estrin

Creature made of clay

Vermont Guardian, November 10-16, 2006

Creature made of clay

By Sheryl Glubok

If John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius J. Reilly had been born in the Bronx to a Jewish mother and a labor organizer father, then he might have turned out to be Alan Krieger, the hero (of sorts) of Marc Estrin’s new wildly inventive novel, Golem Song, published this month by Unbridled Press. 

Alan has prodigious intelligence along with prodigious girth; everything about him is supersized. He can argue equally well about the virtues of White Castle hamburgers or why Aristotle’s theory of rational emotion should be applied to his own concept of disinterested rage. He is well read and loves to spout pithy versions of classic stories, such as an uncomfortable retelling of Oedipus to his mother on Mother’s Day. Not the most appropriate story perhaps for a day meant to celebrate the woman who brought you into the world, but it is if you’re angry with your mother for loving you too much.

Alan is definitely angry. The novel follows him over a period of eight months, during which he eventually loses his job, his lover, his mom to his brother’s house in Vermont, and finally his sanity. Estrin prepares us somewhat for his descent in the second chapter, which begins with a quote from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, a story about a sick, angry, unattractive man whose own mental instability impels him to violence as his imagination gets the best of him.

Yet when we meet Alan, in April 1999, it is at his moment of glory. While at work as an Emergency Room RN, he responds to a Code Green alert in the chapel, where he finds a large black man waving a cross and offering to heal those who will come before him. It’s clear the man is mental, but that doesn’t stop Alan from diving into the man’s delusions. “‘And how shall we call you?’ asked Alan. ‘I am he who cometh in the name of the Lord.’… ‘Master He,’ Alan cried, his free hand turned up in supplication.” The scene continues, masterfully written with both pathos and humor. The would-be messiah asks Alan, “’Child, do you trust in God?’ ‘I do, Master He, I do.’ ‘Come hither.’ ‘ I’m already hither.’” Master He then lays his hands on Alan’s neck and declares that he should “rise up and walk!” Here we see Alan (and Estrin’s) love of the theatrical, “Then Alan began to straighten up along the IV pole. Slowly he rose to his full height — five foot eight and a half. It was an impressive performance — Martha Graham unfolding as a Georgia O’Keefe lily in a Walt Disney nature film.” 

This performance wins Master He’s confidence, and soon the patient breaks down telling Alan his real name, and that he’s off his Lithium. Alan is a compassionate listener and in the end provides his own prescription. 

Alan ripped a page off the inappropriately Jewish calendar hanging with chutzpah on St. Vincent’s own wall. ‘Listen. If ever I-Am-He-Who-Cometh tries to come, I want you to tear off a corner of this paper, roll it up in a little ball, and swallow it with a full glass of water, got it? Then read what’s written here in the middle.’ And in the middle, boxed, inscribed with small caps with his Claritin ballpoint pen, he wrote, OH LORD, MAY I REMEMBER ALWAYS THAT MAN AND GOD ARE NOT ONE. 

It’s a telling sentence, a warning that Alan himself should keep close to his heart, but doesn’t.

This is Estrin’s third novel and a continuation of his exploration into contemporary Jewish identity that he began in his two previous novels, Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa and The Education of Arnold Hitler. Clearly influenced by both Kafka and Dostoevsky, Estrin has achieved an uncomfortable portrait of a Jewish man in the Bronx, who, fearing irrelevance and social decay, succumbs to ethnic hatred of the kind that has plagued Jews for centuries. Like the false messiahs he rails against, Alan comes to believe that he can stop society’s fall. Yet why that’s true, and why blacks become the ultimate target of his rage, are weakly drawn, especially after the opening of the novel shows him attending compassionately to a mentally ill black man. So he likes classical music instead of rap; he’s afraid of black youth culture with its worship of and penchant for violence; the boss that fires him is a black woman who also got the job he wanted; his German girlfriend ends up dumping him for a black man. Perhaps this is Estrin’s point, this type of hatred is not supposed to be rational; the unstable mind has its own logic. We know nothing is worse than a disillusioned idealist. 

The myth of the golem, a creature made of clay by a rabbi in Prague during the 16th century to protect the Jews from their violent, anti-Semitic neighbors, provides a reptilian backbone to the novel. The narrative is sinewy, and meant to provoke. I admit I often laughed out loud. Who couldn’t love the fact that Alan would name his pet boa constrictor Shlong? Estrin isn’t afraid to let Alan be the star of his own fantastic narrative, most of which is told via internal monologue and dialogue. It’s a brave move that requires the readers to make sense of the story for themselves. The author does give us some narrative clues in the form of mini-sections entitled “Paper Trails,” bits of letters or Alan’s writing that illuminate other aspects to his personality that the hero, left to his own devices, might not reveal. 

In the end, Estrin’s novel is a work akin to abstract expressionism, textual blocks of bold imagery and language that express emotion and ideas without coming together into a solid form, like the Golem himself, a creature made of clay.

From the Vermont Guardian. The review is not in the on-line edition.