The English Disease [Hardcover]

Joseph Skibell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 23, 2003

THE ENGLISH DISEASE is a remarkable feat, a story that mixes the Marx brothers and Maimonides, pornographic yoga with Polish paranoia, and the brutality of kindergarten with the beauty of the Kiddush. It's the tale of Charles Belski, an expert in the works of Gustav Mahler, who, like Mahler himself, is talented and neurotic, and a nonpracticing Jew.

Belski suffers guilt over his own contribution to the decline of the Jewish religion, especially since he married a gentile and now has a gentile daughter. As if he can't conjure up enough angst on his own, his great-grandfather appears before him in a dream to admonish him for neglecting the obligations of his faith.

For Belski, the dilemma is how an assimilated intellectual can connect with an ancient and irrational (to him) religion without losing his sense of self. Is he the self-hating Jew that his obstreperous colleague pegs him for? Can his wife and daughter bully him into opening up his heart and letting in a little joy? Belski tries to come to grips with the meaninglessness of modern life, the demands of tradition, the nature of love and fidelity, and the true significance of the lyrics to Goodnight Irene.

Joseph Skibell has written a novel that is sad, funny, daring, and ultimately redemptive.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The sophisticated interplay of conflicted faith and prosaic everyday life, and the clashes between inborn heritage and constructed love, are at the heart of this second novel by the author of the memorable A Blessing on the Moon. A middle-aged secular Jew raised in Texas, Charles Belski is a musicologist who searches for the secret to theology through the works and lives of various historical personalities: Wagner, Mahler, and Zeppo and Groucho Marx. A reluctant husband and father, Belski is also the first of his family to marry outside his religion. The Catholic background of his beautiful wife, Isabelle, is only one of a series of seemingly irreconcilable differences; underlying their marital tension is the disparity between their upbringings and their ways of looking at the world, including their disagreements regarding their daughter Franny's religious upbringing. Belski travels through the canyons of the Southwest with Isabelle to try and save their marriage and to Auschwitz to save his faith, when the key to both might lie closer to their California home. They seem the ultimate mismatched couple: Charles is brooding and neurotic; his wife businesslike and practical. Positively laden with references to the icons of Western culture, and infused with irony and satire, the narrative drags at points when Skibell uses his fictional setting to reflect on the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust and to argue that Wagner contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism. About the quest for both spiritual satisfaction and marital contentment, the story moves to a surprisingly rich denouement in which Charles's dour intellectualism takes second place to his emotional fulfillment.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Skibell, author of A Blessing on the Moon (1997), returns with a wildly funny novel that is equal parts Philip Roth, Groucho Marx, and Woody Allen. The hero, musicologist Charles Belski, rants against American civilization like Portnoy in full cry: "I can't stomach ketchup. The smell and even the sight of it make me queasy, as do the other major American condiments." A self-described "sensitive melancholic" (depression, he notes, was once called the English Disease), Belski struggles most with marriage, fatherhood, and his lack of connection with his Jewish roots. The first--and funniest--part of the novel finds Belski and his long-suffering shiksa wife, Isabelle, on a bizarre tour of the Southwest reminiscent of Humbert Humbert's cross-country trek with Lolita. Belski's later journey to Poland, an odd mix of slapstick and the Holocaust, sits a bit uncomfortably with the rest of the story. The novel never quite holds together, perhaps because Belski's identity crisis seems like the premise to a stand-up comic's monologue: "I was so depressed, I . . ." Still, the monologues are funny enough to make us forget about everything else. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1 edition (May 23, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565122577
• ISBN-13: 978-1565122574
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,613,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joseph Skibell's debut novel, A Blessing on the Moon, received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. A Book of the Month Club selection, the novel was named one of the year's best books by Publishers Weekly, Le Monde and Amazon.Com, and has been translated into half a dozen languages. The novel is currently being adapted into an opera. His second novel, The English Disease, received the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. A Curable Romantic is his third novel. A recipient of a Halls Fiction Fellowship, a Michener Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Skibell is a professor at Emory University and the director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. He has been invited to give the inaugural reading in the Jewish Literature Series at the University of Pennsylania. (Photo by Jeffrey Allen)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Laugh out loud funny, and serious at the same time. Read. En, February 20, 2004

By 

Stuart Hoffman "jazzman" (cheery hill, nj) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The English Disease (Hardcover)

Joe Skibell has my number. He writes about everything I identify with, or have lived with, like Mahler, Wagner, klezmer music, middle class Jews, the holocaust, therapy, Freud, Jung, etc. If you are still reading, and not turned off by this imposing roll-call, let me say he does it with the wit and delivery of Jerry Seinfeld, and other stand-up masters.
It wasn't enough to be born Jewish....but Jewish in Lubbock, Texas? Oy vey! (In the book he calls the town, Karkel) On page 76, professor Skibell (Emory Univ.) states, "The Jewish community of Karkel (Lubbock), Texas, was small". Yeah, I'm glad he told us. Like we'd have thought this small Texas town had four million Jews, with a synagogue, and a hot and cold running mikveh(pre wedding purification bath for women), on every corner.
Skibell's protagonist is a musicologist, Charles Belski ( I know the word musicologist is losing me and Skibell readers), attending a conference in Poland. This leads to ruminations on the holocaust, the Freud Jung breakup, Mahler still battling anti-semitism, even after his converting, Wagner's anti-semitism and racial theories, and Jews in present day Poland.
Read! Enjoy! Have something to eat. A perfect tool for TV withdrawal. Four stars. Five is reserved for Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Solzhenitsyn.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A New Millennium Portnoy Has Appeared, December 26, 2003

By 

L. Young "palmtree2000" (West Orange, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The English Disease (Hardcover)

Charles Belski, musicologist, expert on the neurotically depressed Gustave Mahler, whose 'disease' Belski also shares, finds himself on the assimilated Jew's journey in American to discover who he is and his place in the Jewish world. Belski a new millennium Portnoy is condemned to forever chase the 'shiksa goddess' after his first grade teacher provides him with a six year old beautiful shiksa desk mate. The novel opens with Belski traveling through the Southwest with his shiksa goddess wife with whom he has become disenchanted. We follow Belski through the land of the 'glue eater's' as he takes his gentile daughter to day care and on a trip to Auschwitz with his hilarious colleague Liebowitz, who offers a witty exegesis on how the Marx Brothers are models of the Ascent of Assmiliating Jewish Man. Skibell's writing is intelligent, piquant and fun, and at the end Belski discovers his place on Liebowitz's model Ascent. I won't spoil the book by revealing that place.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, June 16, 2003

By 

moshe r manheim (atlanta, ga United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The English Disease (Hardcover)

The English Disease is a wonderful blend of the neurotic realities faced by Americans of any culture faced with assimilation. The struggle of Jewish-Americans' assimilation struggles are echoed by many Americans and Skibell's character takes this topic to places it's never been.

His thoughts are mimic those of many American Jews who struggle with the juxtaposition of American life, and Jewish spirituality. I laughed out loud at parts and was amazed at Skibell's observations in others.