(By downloading this image, you agree to use the art in its entirety. Art must be used in connection with promotion or coverage of In the Mouth; ISBN 9781884800825.)
Acclaim
Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for best Jewish fiction of 2008; shortlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal, selected by the American Library Association to recognize that year’s “most distinguished contribution to Jewish literature for adults,” finalist for Foreword Magazine’s Best Books of 2008.
“…an American talent” —Stephen King
“Funny, rueful, wise stories, steeped in absurdity, pain, possibility:
the work of a writer who has lived.” —Gish Jen
“Eileen Pollack writes with great acuity, humor, and intelligent resignation […] This book is terrific company.” —Lorrie Moore
REVIEW: San Francisco Chronicle (link)
Kirkus Reviews 3/1/2008
“Incisive, beautifully crafted stories about family relationships, focused especially on the dynamic between fathers and daughters.
“Pollack (Paradise, New York, 1998, etc.) looks lovingly and longingly at the way families work, particularly when death is impending. It’s hard to choose favorites here, for all are worthy. ‘The Bris’ examines the life of James Sloan, who has been living a lie, and now, on the point of death, charges his son Marcus with the task of finding a mohel who will perform a bris so he can be buried next to his wife in an Orthodox cemetery. As James’s health declines, Marcus’s anxiety and desperation increase, for the rabbi refuses to countenance the bris for both religious and personal reasons. (A competitive player, the rabbi won’t even consider the request until Marcus wins at least two games in a set of tennis.) Marcus is finally led to take matters into his own hands, as it were. ‘Uno’ introduces us to Heloise and Mitch, who on holiday at the Sunshine Lodge (where the food is so pure ‘you needed a spiritual license to be allowed to eat’) meet a family that includes Sarah and Meribeth, Siamese twins who help call into question Heloise’s tidy world. The longest piece is ‘Beached in Boca,’ a nuanced story that weaves together three narrative lines with great delicacy. Wendy has come to visit her father in Boca Raton only to find out that he has AIDS. Dealing with the jolt of this revelation, she examines her own sexual history and her inability to commit to her current lover, a 60-year-old professor from Montana. At her father’s condominium complex she meets (and is strongly attracted to) Adam Haber, whose father recently committed suicide because the body of a former lover was found in a barrel in the basement of his house.
“Delicate but dazzling.”
Ploughshares, Fall 2008, Review
“In the Mouth, stories and novellas by Eileen Pollack (Four Way): How’s this for brave? One narrator, a son, is obsessed with fulfilling his dying father’s request for a belated circumcision, even at the son’s own hands. How’s this for unflinching? Another narrator, a mother, is troubled by something as normal but taboo as a kind of lust for her newborn son’s attentions. In the six stories and novellas that make up her latest collection, Eileen Pollack exhibits the fearless gift of taking the “un” out of unspeakable.
Best of all: she does it with precision. A nursing mother admits “vague irritation” at her newborn’s insistence at her nipple “as if a street-corner beggar kept pulling at her arm.” A young doctor reluctantly asking intimate questions of a woman patient is “shy as a boy whose mother has asked him to unhook her brassiere.”
Widening her lens, Ms. Pollack stares unblinking at the larger groups to which these all-too-human behaviors obtain. She scores Christians for being “stingy, not only with their money but with their love,” as well as a bunch of Hasidic Jews for channeling money for a camp for retarded teens into a getaway for themselves. (If anti-Semitism can ever be said to be funny, she tests its outside limit.) Even a well-meaning married couple, subset of a group we all recognize if can?t necessarily name, doesn’t escape the marksmanship of her pen: “They signed petitions. They volunteered. They were just a little too earnest. It wasn’t that their lives were untroubled… They saw heartbreak every day. But these troubles didn’t seem to trouble them. It was as if they were standing in the rain, talking about how wet they were getting, but you could see the water rolling right off their Gore-Tex shells.”
One senses that it’s anger as well as affection—and often a blend of the two, with grief for the human comedy tossed somewhere in the mix—that fuels her remarkable specificity. The shaggy head of an old man smells of “urine, sardines, and Vitalis.” Another who keeps the trunk of his car “cleaner than most people kept their mouths,” replaces a divot during a golf game with “the care a plastic surgeon might bestow upon repairing a young girl’s face.” In between forking bites of beef macaroni into his maw, yet another old-timer delivers a hug so monumental that it leaves him “as shaken as a soldier who has darted across a field to grab a fallen comrade.” Gentleness shares space in the heart with brutality.
Perhaps inevitably, nowhere is Ms. Pollack more fraught than in describing the act of making love between middle-aged people with parent troubles. In the final story, “Beached in Boca,” the woman is someone who prefers her beach water choppy. The man is a toy importer, someone whose father has scandalized his Florida retirement community with a particularly unseemly murder and who is endeavoring to care as little as possible about anything anymore. Nevertheless there’s this: “He pressed one hand against her breast while sliding the other hand up her thigh. For some reason, she was reminded of the flat wood box in which a person could slip a coin and make it disappear. All those years importing novelties seemed to have given Adam Haber the sleight-of-hand required to remove a woman’s underwear without taking off her shorts. He could palm her hand and make it vanish, and then, with a sideways smile, lay it back inside her ribs. It was a trick, but not a bad trick.” —Daniel Asa Rose
Daniel Asa Rose edits The Reading Room, a literary journal, and is the author of three books: the story collection Small Family with Rooster, the novel Flipping for It, and Hiding Places, a memoir.”
Reviewed in Michigan Quarterly Review
Excerpt from “The Bris”
When Marcus packed for Florida, he harbored no illusions about what would happen when he got there. His father’s liver soon would fail, and, without a transplant, he couldn’t survive the week. “Why waste a miracle on an elderly man like me?” his father scoffed. He pooh-poohed the new liver as if it were a slightly used sports car Marcus insisted he buy. “At least let me put your name on the waiting list,” Marcus said, but his father blew raspberries through the phone. “Give that same liver to someone young, and he or she could get another fifty years out of the goddamn thing.”
And so, with a heavy carry-on and an even heavier heart, Marcus flew to West Palm Beach. He rented a car and drove to the hospital in Boca Raton where his father had been taken after his last collapse. As he checked in at Registration and followed the arrows to the room, he prepared for the likelihood that in another few days he would be arranging his father’s funeral. What he couldn’t have predicted was that first he would be called on to arrange his father’s bris.
“Your bris, Pop?” Marcus laughed, although his father rarely joked; for a former hotelkeeper in the Catskills, he was a singularly humorless man. His request that Marcus find a mohel who would circumcise him before he died could only be an effect of the drugs he was taking or the poison seeping from his liver. “Don’t worry, Pop. All of that was taken care of a long time ago.”
His father waved a bloated yellow arm. Hooked up to an IV, he reminded Marcus of an inflated creature in the Thanksgiving Day parade. “A lie,” his father gasped. “Everything has been a lie.”
Read what Stephen King has to say about Eileen’s story “The Bris,” which he selected for this year’s Best American Short Stories anthology: Stephen King Essay (NY Times)
Recent Comments