Publishers Weekly - October 30, 2017

Review_FICTION PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ; OCTOBER 30, 2017 52

Dara Horn’s funny and compassionate novel

Eternal Life follows a woman who has lived for

2,000 years (reviewed on this page).

The Chateau

Paul Goldberg. Picador, $26 (384p) ISBN 978-

1-250-11609-3

Goldberg’s second novel, after The Yid, is a salty, witty, tragic comedy that mocks Russian Jewish immigrants, Florida retirees, condo living, “Donal’d Tramp,” elderly sex, old folks who scam the early bird dinner specials, and more. Bill Katzenelenbogen, a 52-year-old science writer, has just been fired from his reporter job at the Washington Post for insubordination. Broke and depressed, he is desperate to reclaim his reputation. When he learns his college roommate, a Miami plastic surgeon (“The Butt God of Miami Beach”), died falling off a hotel balcony, Bill sees a way to turn his pal’s death into a book deal and cash. With no money, he heads down to investigate the death, staying with his estranged father, Melsor, at his crumbling Florida retirement condo, the Chateau Sedan Neuve, a stewpot of whining neighbors behaving badly. Melsor is a Russian dissident and Medicare fraudster who is determined to purge the condo board of its criminal element. Soon Bill becomes unwillingly entangled in Melsor’s schemes, commits several felonies, and wonders what his friend was thinking as he was falling to his death. Filled with gags, slapstick, and snappy repartee, this satire provides sharp commentary on American society as well as an affecting story of old people with nowhere to go and no way to get there. (Feb.)

; Red Sky at Noon

Simon Sebag Montefiore. Pegasus (Norton, dist.), $25.95 (416p) ISBN 978-1-68177-673-6

Montefiore’s third novel in his Moscow
Trilogy (after Sashenka and One Night in
Winter) is a stunning World War II story
set on the bloody Russian front outside
Stalingrad in July 1942. Benya Golden
is a Jewish writer and political prisoner
unjustly convicted of treason and sen-
tenced to 10 years in the gulag. Stalin
organizes criminals, convicts, and polit-
ical prisoners into penal battalions known
as Smertniki, the Dead Ones, who are
thrown into battle as cannon fodder to
be redeemed only by combat death or
wounds. Benya is assigned to a penal
Cossack cavalry regiment that becomes
trapped behind enemy lines after a disas-
trous frontal assault. Only Benya and six
other men survive the attack. They link
up with a band of partisans, not knowing
they are part of a high-level Russian
deception plan involving Stalingrad’s
defense. Ambush, capture, escape,
interrogation, and execution await the
Smertniki, as the Germans and their Axis
allies and the Russians slaughter each
other. Benya’s brief, intense romance with
an Italian nurse gives him hope where he
expects only death, but there is one more
mission he must complete before his life
is redeemed. (Stalin and his daughter
Svetlana play a role in this story, too.)
Montefiore’s immersive portrayal of the
Eastern Front makes this a gripping, con-
vincing tale. (Jan.)

Eternal Life

Dara Horn. Norton, $25.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-

393-60853-3

At the heart of Horn’s funny and com-
passionate novel is a 2,000-year-old Jewish
mother seeking reasons for living, some
way of dying, and help for her 56-year-old
son who lives in her basement. Rachel’s
story begins in Roman-occupied Jerusalem,
where at 16 she marries her father’s appren-
tice although she loves the high priest’s
son, Elazar, and is pregnant with Elazar’s
baby. Two years later, when the child falls
ill, Rachel makes a bargain with God: she
must give up not her life but her death in
exchange for the child’s survival. The child
survives, and Rachel endures successive
lifetimes over the next 20 centuries, each
lifetime immediately following the pre-
vious. Elazar, having made a similar bargain,
pursues Rachel through time, occasion-
ally finding her, though never for long.
Now in 21st-century New York, Rachel’s
current form (or “version,” as she calls it)
is an 84-year-old widow. She thinks she
has found a way to finally die, but first she
wants to see her current problem child,
the one in the basement, get a life. She
also wishes to protect her granddaughter,
a medical researcher dangerously close to
discovering the truth behind Rachel’s
unusual DNA. Horn (A Guide for the
Perplexed) weaves historical detail and
down-to-earth humor into this charming
Jewish Groundhog Day spanning two mil-
lennia. (Jan.)

Brass

Xhenet Aliu. Random House, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-0-399-59024-5

Aliu juxtaposes a mother and daughter’s late teenage desperation 17 years apart in her striking first novel. In the mid-’90s, Elsie waits tables at a greasy spoon in post-industrial Waterbury, Conn. She pins her hopes for upward mobility on Bashkim, an Albanian immigrant who left his wife in the old country and funnels all his money into mysterious investments. An unplanned pregnancy forces them into uneasy cohabitation, where Elsie copes with her mother’s pessimism, the derision of the Albanian wives of Bashkim’s friends, and her partner’s alarming volatility. Aliu intersperses the story of their daughter, Luljeta, a senior in high school whose own hopes for escape from Waterbury are dashed with a rejection from NYU. As she reels, she also discovers her extended Albanian family still lives in the area and can answer questions about the father her mother claimed had died. With the help of Albanian teenager Ahmet, whose modest dreams of Panera franchises starkly contrast with Luljeta’s glamorous goals of leaving town, she sets off to finally find her father. This is a