The English Disease

March 31, 2003
The sophisticated interplay of conflicted faith and prosaic everyday life, and the clashes between inborn heritage and constructed love, are at the heart of this second novel by the author of the memorable A Blessing on the Moon. A middle-aged secular Jew raised in Texas, Charles Belski is a musicologist who searches for the secret to theology through the works and lives of various historical personalities: Wagner, Mahler, and Zeppo and Groucho Marx. A reluctant husband and father, Belski is also the first of his family to marry outside his religion. The Catholic background of his beautiful wife, Isabelle, is only one of a series of seemingly irreconcilable differences; underlying their marital tension is the disparity between their upbringings and their ways of looking at the world, including their disagreements regarding their daughter Franny's religious upbringing. Belski travels through the canyons of the Southwest with Isabelle to try and save their marriage and to Auschwitz to save his faith, when the key to both might lie closer to their California home. They seem the ultimate mismatched couple: Charles is brooding and neurotic; his wife businesslike and practical. Positively laden with references to the icons of Western culture, and infused with irony and satire, the narrative drags at points when Skibell uses his fictional setting to reflect on the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust and to argue that Wagner contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism. About the quest for both spiritual satisfaction and marital contentment, the story moves to a surprisingly rich denouement in which Charles's dour intellectualism takes second place to his emotional fulfillment. 10-city author tour.

April 1, 2003
Melancholia was once known as the English disease, and touring the ruins of antiquity was seen as a cure, since, as the author notes, "contemplation of actual ruins would make one's own ruined life seem less hateful." This new novel by Skibell (A Blessing on the Moon) begins with Charles Belski and his wife, Isabelle, pitching a tent in the American Southwest and arguing about Mahler. If Alma couldn't be faithful to the genius Mahler, how can any marriage stand a chance? And if she could clandestinely have affairs, why couldn't she clandestinely compose? Belski spends the whole of this novel trying to save (or end) his marriage and coming to terms with what it means to be a Jew in contemporary times. Later, on a trip to Poland with a musicologist colleague, he muses about the insanity of paying to see the sites where his ancestors were slaughtered; visiting ruins doesn't seem to cure this patient. Despite the subject matter, this is a widely entertaining story-particularly because of the absurdist juxtapositions. The exposition on the Marx Brothers as a model of "the Ascent of the Assimilating Jewish Man" is priceless. Highly recommended for literary fiction collections.-Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll. Lib.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2003
Skibell, author of " A Blessing on the Moon" (1997), returns with a wildly funny novel that is equal parts Philip Roth, Groucho Marx, and Woody Allen. The hero, musicologist Charles Belski, rants against American civilization like Portnoy in full cry: "I can't stomach ketchup. The smell and even the sight of it make me queasy, as do the other major American condiments." A self-described "sensitive melancholic" (depression, he notes, was once called the English Disease), Belski struggles most with marriage, fatherhood, and his lack of connection with his Jewish roots. The first--and funniest--part of the novel finds Belski and his long-suffering shiksa wife, Isabelle, on a bizarre tour of the Southwest reminiscent of Humbert Humbert's cross-country trek with Lolita. Belski's later journey to Poland, an odd mix of slapstick and the Holocaust, sits a bit uncomfortably with the rest of the story. The novel never quite holds together, perhaps because Belski's identity crisis seems like the premise to a stand-up comic's monologue: "I was so depressed, I . . ." Still, the monologues are funny enough to make us forget about everything else.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)