Feh by Shalom Auslander review: 'there is no totem Auslander will not topple'

His first novel, Hope: A Tragedy, featured a man who discovered an elderly and cantankerous Anne Frank living in his attic. It was followed by Mother For Dinner, about a family of cannibals and their difficulties fitting in to multicultural America. This new memoir combines the same outrage as his first, Foreskin’s Lament, coupled with the utter irreverence of his stories, Beware Of God (and his podcast, UNGODLY: indeed parts of it are in Feh). There is no totem which Auslander will not topple, no taboo he will not extirpate, no sacred cow or golden calf he will not… I don’t even want to think about what he might do. This is a man, who, on receiving a literary award, expressed surprise at winning since Hilary Mantel usually won everything, even various categories of the pornography Oscars. He is juvenile, sarcastic, outrageous and not only one of the funniest but one of the most profoundly moral writers I know.

Feh is billed as a memoir but is in fact a kind of scrapbook. It has industry gossip, Kafka, childhood reminiscence, little parables, retellings of Biblical stories, an account of his friendship with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, LGBTQ+ politics, Covid, paranoia and the critic Michiko Kakutani; but its thread is the untranslatable “feh”. “– Do you know what the word feh means? I asked Steve one afternoon. – Feh? – Feh. It was a Yiddish word, I explained, to convey disgust and disapproval”. Auslander gives examples of usage that differentiate feh from the similar bah or meh. In this section, feh “is also the name of the story I had been told ever since I was a child. It was what God said about us, about humankind; and ever since, humankind has agreed”.

The opening is typically mordant, and full of misdirection. Auslander is rushed to hospital with his “pancreas eating itself”. He denies he has attempted suicide but does admit he has drunk from a bottle marked Danger, Toxic and Not For Human Consumption. He has, in fact, been taking illegal weight loss drugs – a moderately epic amount of them – which include substances similar to video head cleaner and methamphetamine. The sock ’em snap comes when he reveals he was not trying to end his life, he was trying to feel better about himself. Somehow Auslander manages to be hypochondriac and recklessly unhealthy at one and the same time, and see no contradiction in it.

The voice, the attitude and the perspective are so strong that it does not matter that Auslander basically alights on anything and turns it to gristly grist. There are alterations in the tone, with Auslander using the idiolects of advertising, orthodox schooling and (very effectively) pre-programme announcements and critiques of a television show called Auslander (sometimes with angels reminiscing about their favourite, wackiest and most humiliating episodes). But the moral core does not swerve. Indeed, the ire and indignation only make sense in a world that has the idea but not the implementation of value. Take this cadenza: “The religions of the world may argue about the nature of God and the afterlife, but they all agree of this: The wealthy cheat sits up from with the holy man, while the poor man stands in the back... Because the Jews love money, sure sure, but once upon a time a Jew names Jesus condemned the hypocrisy of the wealthy clergy of his time; today the church that calls him God is worth thirty billion dollars. You want to blame the Jews for the death of Christ’s body, go ahead, but it is Christians who crucified his soul”. There are very few Church of Scotland ministers I know who would be brave enough to put it so bluntly.

Again, what separates this from impotent seething is glimpses of unexpected kindness and empathy. Sudden laughter breaks like an epiphany. There is a chance encounter with a blind man in the café where he writes and the revelation “Until I was blind, I didn’t know just how many people were kind”. At the end of the book, Auslander has an epilogue with a few paragraphs on a painting by the Danish artist Carl Bloch – many Jehovah’s Witness Bibles use his maudlin paintings of an exceptionally Aryan Jesus. It’s of the Sermon on the Mount, and I had never noticed the small girl entranced by a red butterfly father than the most precise articulation of Christian ethics.

It is unsurprising that the Book of Job is fundamental to Auslander, not just in its depiction of the good man refusing to accept that his suffering is proof of his immorality, but in the almost absurdist theophany than answers nothing. But there is a literary twist so audacious as to petrify me again. Auslander reimages the Bible with God as the antagonist, and to prove his point rewrites The Three Little Pigs from the wolf’s perspective. In a funny ha-ha, funny peculiar and funny deeply troubling, it works. Only is Auslander’s universe could it be kosher to side with the character saying “f*** those pigs”.

Feh, by Shalom Auslander, Corsair, £22