Customer Reviews

Ziff: A Life?: A Novel

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I can admire Alan Lelchuk's craft; he is a good writer. The structure of the book is clever and the plotting is expert. But the subject matter here - the kind of ambition and duplicity that apparently obtains amongst older Jewish-American novelists - is tiresome, to me at least. I am fairly sure that this is a roman à clef, but since I don't keep up with what's going on in the world of East Coast Jewish authorial circles, the wink-and-a-nudge references were nonetheless frustratingly obscure. That, coupled with the distasteful self-absorption of the characters themselves, made this book a slog for me.

My advice: If you read the New York Review of Books, if you have an interest in the politics, in-jokes and gossip of that world, this might be for you. Otherwise I'd really suggest you give it a pass.

No serious reader of contemporary American fiction should pass this novel by. It's a splendid investigation of important themes like identity, celebrity, mortality,and personal authenticity. Unlike so many contemporary novelists, Lelchuk is truly and boldly self-revealing, not childishly exhibitionistic. ZIFF: A LIFE?, as it title suggests, is full of questions; its mood is one of frank skepticism, and its focus one of intense scrutiny of the self and the world, of assigned vs. achieved morality, of what it is to be a man, a writer, a friend, a mortal.
There is no piety in this book and no currying for literary favor. It's not surprising that some publications and some critics are threatened by its interrogation of the literary status quo. I strongly urge those who are interested in the true cutting edge -- that of the original artist having his say without concern for passing fashion and passing authority -- buy this book today. Buy two -- give one to a friend.