| Crime |
| Satire |
| Fiction |
| Jewish |
Summary
Summary
"We have proverb in Florida...You know why it's good to be on beach?"
Bill smiles, but says nothing. He wants the guy to keep talking.
"Because on beach you are surrounded by idiots on only three sides."
"And on the remaining side you have what?" asks Bill.
"Sharks..."
Paul Goldberg, the acclaimed author of The Yid , takes us behind the scenes of a Florida condo board election, delivering a wild spin on Miami Beach, petty crime, Jewish identity, and life in Trump's America.
It is January 2017 and Bill has hit rock bottom. Yesterday, he was William M. Katzenelenbogen, successful science reporter at The Washington Post . But things have taken a turn. Fired from his job, aimless, with exactly $1,219.37 in his checking account, he learns that his college roommate, a plastic surgeon known far and wide as the "Butt God of Miami Beach," has fallen to his death under salacious circumstances. With nothing to lose, Bill boards a flight for Florida's Gold Coast, ready to begin his own investigation--a last ditch attempt to revive his career.
There's just one catch: Bill's father, Melsor.
Melsor Yakovlevich Katzenelenbogen--poet, literary scholar, political dissident, small-time-crook--is angling for control of the condo board at the Château Sedan Neuve, a crumbling high-rise in Hollywood, Florida, populated mostly by Russian Jewish immigrants. The current board is filled with fraudsters levying "special assessments" on residents, and Melsor will use any means necessary to win the board election. And who better to help him than his estranged son?
As he did in The Yid , Paul Goldberg has taken something we think we know and turned it on its ear. Featuring a colorful cast of characters, The Château guarantees that you will never look at condo boards, crime, kleptocracy, vodka, Fascism, or Florida the same way again.
Author Notes
Paul Goldberg's debut novel The Yid was published in 2016 to widespread acclaim and named a finalist for both the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the National Jewish Book Award's Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction. As a reporter, Goldberg has written two books about the Soviet human rights movement, and has co-authored (with Otis Brawley) the book How We Do Harm , an expose of the U.S. healthcare system. He is the editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter , a publication focused on the business and politics of cancer. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Goldberg follows his delirious Stalin-era satire, The Yid (2016), with an equally caustic send-up of today's brand of authoritarianism. After being summarily fired by the Washington Post, science reporter Bill (actually Ilya) Katzenelenbogen heads to Hollywood, Florida, where an old friend, a megawealthy plastic surgeon billboard-advertised as the Butt God of Miami Beach, mysteriously plunged to his death. Bill intends to investigate but is immediately sidelined by the vicious power struggle among condo board members at the Château, the high-rise home of villainous Jewish-Russian émigrés, including his long-estranged fraudster father. Unaware that Bill, too, is Russian, the residents peg him as an FBI agent on the trail of their outrageous kickback scheme. Depressed, pickled in cheap vodka, and back under the thumb of his fearless, diabolically scheming father once a courageous dissident poet in their homeland, now an avid Trump supporter Bill bumbles from disaster to discovery. With allusions to Gogol, Miami Modern architect Morris Lapidus, and his own medical journalism, impishly comedic Goldberg peer to Tom Wolfe, Leslie Epstein, and Stanley Elkin cannily burlesques the toxicity of human folly under Trump and Putin.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Having lost his job as a reporter at the Washington Post, William ("Bill") Melsorovich sets off for Florida to investigate the suspicious death of his college roommate Zbignew Stanislaw Wronski, a plastic surgeon known locally as the Butt God of Miami. Bill will renew his troubled relationship with his father, Melsor, who's challenging the condo board at Château Sedan Neuve, a high-rise overlooking the sea with a contentious bunch of residents, many Russian Jews. The Katzenelenbogens emigrated from the USSR when Bill was young, which explains why numerous sentences and paragraphs are written in Russian (always translated) but not, curiously and inexplicably, why some appear in the Cyrillic alphabet and others in the Latin. This book has the same sharp writing and madcap air of Goldberg's award-winning debut, The Yid, but it is a less assured work plagued by overwriting, as if the author's aim were to convince us of his undeniably impressive talent. Verdict To be savored more for its style than its story, this work will appeal to those who appreciate an offbeat sense of humor and the immigrant angle. [See Prepub Alert, 10/5/17.]-Edward Cone, New York © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.