Customer Reviews

Unstrung Heroes: My Improbable Life with Four Impossible Uncles

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Franz Lidz is a natural storyteller. The recollections that make up Unstrung Heroes are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always intelligent, perceptive, surprising, and most importantly, human. Most novels are disguised memoirs; this memoir is a disguised novel.

Unstrung Heroes is one of the most touching and simutaneously disturbing books I've read in quite a while. In an unforgettable series of memoirs, Lidz succeeds in retelling the astonishing events of his life in an affecting and heartfelt manner. Somehow, through all of this, he keeps you rolling on the floor in laughter.

A marvelously nuanced, subtle, and unillusioned recounting of one boy's life among the strangest of families. This offbeat gem has the makings of a classic.

It's interesting to watch the jagged leaps and bounds by which this hilarious, unsentimental Lower East Side memoir became a sentimental tearjerker about a beautiful mother dying of cancer in L.A. That Hollywood gets Jewishness wrong again and again should come as a surprise to no one (Remember Melanie Griffith in "A Stranger Among Us"?) But the story of "Unstrung Heroes" is a rather spectacular example of Disney not getting anything about New York at all. The movie is a sanitized ode to motherhood, that is that it is practically impossible to watch without crying. I cried (many times) while reading the book, but somehow the tears felt more honest.

I actually read this extremely moving memoir in hardback (1991) and thought it would make a great film. Too bad: Disney turned it into an exceedingly mediocre film. But the book endures and justifies all the lavish praise heaped on it back it '91.

I just read of the death of (Uncle) Harry Lidz in the April 8, 1999 New York Times. Of all the mad Lidz brothers described in this great memoir, Harry was my all-time favorite. In memory of the undefeated boxing champ and Abraham Lincoln Brigadeer, here's the poem Harry wrote in 1931 that appears in Unstrung Heroes: The trains scream to a stop/ And the toilweary crowd surges in/ From factory and shop/ Homeward bound for the night with their kin/ Hear that chant, all about/ Sway to it, vacantly/ Clackerty, clickerty/ Wheels spinning, wheels singing/ Hopeful hearts, flying on/ Hearts all dead, grinding on/ Tearful hearts, tugging on/ Hearts with hate, roaring on/ Clackerty, rushing wheels/ Clickerty, spinning wheels/ Centuries, warm with love/ Centuries, cold with fear/ Hear that chant of life's throb/ Swaying on, year by year.

The funny, touching, unflinching memoir was totally eviscerated by Hollywood hacks. The book is full of whimsy and gentle irony; the film trades on sentiment and Rodeo Drive wisdom. The book is a small-scale Dostoyevsky novel in which the awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as it is terrible. The film is a cliched dying-mother tearjerker that panders to its Disney audience. The book brings to life a whole gallery of people; people of bone, flesh and blood all caught in a web of circumstance. It engulfs its characters in dramatic situations and drives them headlong with passionate desperation. In the film, these characters are cartoons who walk through predictable paces and have the most banal of revelations. In the book, their blood is warm, red and their hearts beat on.

Most humorous writing isn't funny when it comes out, let alone years later. The majority of the New Yorker's Algonquin Round Table -- writers such as Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker -- simply aren't that amusing on second reading. Lidz is different -- simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking -- with no cloying sentiment. Read him and you'll hook up with the greatest humorists of the past (Updike and Roth are great Lidz fans).

Like all great comic writers, Franz Lidz has become an explorer of the deepest places of the heart, of love and pain and loss. Conveyed with total authenticity and the shock of freshness, Unstrung Heroes is a haunting, deeply felt recreation of a childhood.

I picked this up because I love Franz Lidz's whimsical essays in the Sunday New York Times. He paints like Paul Klee, and his portraits are artistically powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked the depths of thought that lie behind them, and around them, I believe he would still be a great memoirist.