Meiselman: The Lean Years

by Avner Landes

Overview

Meiselman has had enough. After a life spent playing by the rules, this lonely thirty-six-year-old man—"number two" at a suburban Chicago public library, in charge of events and programs, and in no control whatsoever over his fantasies about his domineering boss—is looking to come out on top, at last. What seems like an ordinary week in 2004 will prove to be a golden opportunity (at least in his mind) to reverse a lifetime of petty humiliations. And no one—not his newly observant wife, not the Holocaust survivor neighbor who regularly disturbs his sleep with her late-night gardening, and certainly not the former-classmate-turned-renowned-author who's returning to the library for a triumphant literary homecoming—will stand in his way.

"Meiselman is a triumph of comic escalation." — Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The Ask

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948954143
Publisher:	Tortoise Books
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Series:	New Chicago Classics , #7
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.93(d)

About the Author

Avner Landes earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University, and works as a ghostwriter. He grew up in Skokie, Illinois, in a family that came to Chicagoland in the early 1900s; he now lives near Tel Aviv with his wife and two children.
Find him on Twitter: @AvnerLandes

Editorial Reviews

01/04/2021

Landes’s darkly funny debut chronicles a suburban schlemiel’s endless capacity for self-sabotage. Living in the rigid orthodox Jewish community of New Niles, Meiselman outwardly plays the dutiful son and husband. Yet, on the inside, he is itching for greater recognition. He finds an opportunity when his boss, head of the local public library, takes ill and asks him to moderate an upcoming discussion with controversial author Izzy Shenkenberg, a former classmate of Meiselman’s. Shenkenberg has shrugged off the yoke of their religious upbringing and is famous for writing a novel condemned by a local rabbi for “severe sins of evil speech, scoffing, gossip, slander, and demeaning Torah scholars.” Meiselman decides to play the hero and give Shenkenberg his comeuppance for scandalizing their congregation, but in the week leading up to the event, Meiselman’s delusions of grandeur repeatedly collide with reality, to tragic and hilarious effect. Landes succeeds in depicting the nuances of the religious community, though some of Meiselman’s more outlandish fantasies and flashbacks detailing sexual confessions to his therapist tread too closely to Portnoy’s Complaint territory. Fans of Shalom Auslander will appreciate this. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A finalist for the Chicago Writers Association's Book of the Year Award!

"Landes’s darkly funny debut chronicles a suburban schlemiel’s endless capacity for self-sabotage....Meiselman’s delusions of grandeur repeatedly collide with reality, to tragic and hilarious effect....Fans of Shalom Auslander will appreciate this." — Publishers Weekly

"...[a] rambunctious, Mitty-esque tale....many of its set pieces are great fun, the more cringeworthy the better; Meiselman’s struggles to be a good husband, employee, and Jew are serious, but there’s comedy in his falling short." — Kirkus Reviews

"Meiselman: The Lean Years is a triumph of comic escalation, as well as a rich, witty exploration of the major elements of life, including family, community, love, work, ambition, faith, and ritual, not to mention the unforgettable power-hitting of the legendary Frank Thomas, AKA 'The Big Hurt.' Meiselman is a compelling figure, trapped between a craving for the validation of his world and a desire to somehow escape it, and Landes charts his unraveling with deadpan precision and a deep commitment to capturing both the horror and hilarity of living inside certain American and Jewish and Jewish-American paradoxes. While reminiscent of past astonishers like Stanley Elkin and Bruce Jay Friedman, Landes comes to the plate with a stance and a style all his own." — Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The Ask

"Avner Landes's debut novel echoes the later work of Isaac Singer set in the modern Orthodox community in Chicago. Equally, it calls to mind the contemporary novels and stories of Sam Lipsyte. Here you have the Channukah gift to end all Channukah gifts. Seriously funny—painfully serious and hilariously funny—Meiselman: The Lean Years is the literary equivalent of Charlie Chaplin slipping on a banana peel. Do yourself a big favor and read this book." — Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Rabbits for Food

"If you like Nikolai Gogol's comic stories about put-upon underdogs, or John Kennedy O'Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, about the life of a misshapen man, or if you like Sam Lipsyte's insane comedy of a feckless antihero, The Ask, or if you like Meshugah, the brilliantly comic novel of expat Jews by Isaac Bashevis Singer, or even if you like Saul Bellow's ebullient novel of middle-aged collapse, Seize the Day, then you will love Avner Landes' comic novel Meiselman, a novel that belongs on the same shelf as these books." — Joseph G. Peterson, author of The Rumphulus

"If Saul Bellow wrote a comedy of manners set in the Bush years, it would resemble Avner Landes's very funny and ribald Meiselman: The Lean Years. Combining the workplace comedy and a portrait of a marriage, this rollicking tour through Meiselman's agitations and mortifications is both a treat and a trick of Landes's sharp and fluid prose." — Leland Cheuk, author of No Good Very Bad Asian

"Meiselman: The Lean Years is a rich buffet of novelistic pleasures, including vivid characters, a finely textured portrait of the Jewish suburbs of Chicago, and a series of tragic-hilarious set pieces that simultaneously make you smile and cringe in recognition. Avner Landes delves into the head and heart of his comic hero with dexterous and supple prose that thrills and surprises on every page." — Aaron Hamburger, author of Nirvana Is Here

"Meiselman is miserable: under-sexed, overworked, a human receptacle for small humiliations. Thankfully, Avner Landes is a superlative chronicler of American Jewish middle-aged male misery, bringing to mind the Bruce Jay Friedman of Stern and the Saul Bellow of Herzog in this funny, lively, rendering of one man’s tsuris.” — Adam Wilson, author of Sensation Machines

From the Publisher

2020-09-16
A suburban man confronts a series of shortcomings—sexual, professional, and otherwise—in this rambunctious, Mitty-esque tale.

The title character of Landes’ ambitious debut novel is a 36-year-old man navigating a series of low-grade crises over the course of a week. As an administrator at a public library outside Chicago, he’s slated to interview an acclaimed author whose latest novel allegedly mars the good name of a beloved rabbi they knew growing up. Efforts to conceive with his wife are falling short, and the blame falls squarely on him. His neighbor’s gardening habits are exasperating—pre-dawn lawn mowing, pools of standing water in her backyard—but since she’s a Holocaust survivor he must tread gingerly. His seatmate at shul is a beefy boor, his beloved White Sox are struggling, his older brother is more accomplished—the trials never end for our nebbishy hero. “Meiselman was fed up, literally and figuratively, with everyone putting their dirty paws on him,” he laments. “After thirty-six years, Meiselman had reached a limit, a breaking point.” Though these crises are all relatively small beer, there’s an inherent comedy in Meiselman’s working up the nerve to work up some nerve, which leads to some peculiar acts, including a masturbatory calamity in bed with his wife and quasi-flirtation with a community college student researching Julius Caesar. Stylistically, the novel reads like a pastiche of contemporary Jewish American lit: It evokes the grievance-struck longueurs of Bellow’s Herzog, the anxiety of Sam Lipsyte and Gary Shteyngart’s schlubby, emasculated protagonists, and the heterodox satire of 1970s Roth. With so much literary baggage, the novel strains to achieve full liftoff, but many of its set pieces are great fun, the more cringeworthy the better; Meiselman’s struggles to be a good husband, employee, and Jew are serious, but there’s comedy in his falling short.

A brash, bulky yarn about one man’s determination to get his life in order.

Kirkus Reviews