To Rise Again at a Decent Hour Review
A Strikeout With Dearest and God
When Joshua Ferris's "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour" arrived in May, there was no reason to suspect it would make history. Simply Mr. Ferris, along with Karen Joy Fowler ("We Are All Completely Abreast Ourselves"), is 1 of the outset two Americans with novels to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014. (This is the commencement twelvemonth in which writers from the United States have been eligible.) Happily for Mr. Ferris, it is also the year he far surpassed his first two books.
"To Rise Once again at a Decent Hour" also hits a high-h2o mark in the literature of dentistry, however express that may exist. Its master character, Dr. Paul O'Rourke, artfully introduces himself as a great many things in the novel's opening pages. He is a New York dentist, misanthrope, Cerise Sox fan, strikeout with women and de facto atheist with a craving for oral sexual practice behind grocery stores.
"It is most easily washed in New Jersey, where it happens to be legal," he confides. This sounds like a tiny homage to Philip Roth, who is certainly one of the volume'southward sources of inspiration. Paul may not exist Jewish, but y'all'd never know it from his obsessions — Judaism beingness one of them.
Mr. Ferris ushers Paul into the volume on a caustic wave of cruelty that'due south as dissentious to the dentist as information technology is to his patients. "A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be," Paul tells the reader. "That he's also one-half-mortician is the undercover he keeps to himself." Ergo, every rima oris into which he looks is already one-half-dead, and every patient in his Park Avenue practice is sharing the secret of his or her mortality only by letting Paul run into it. Mr. Ferris has said that he chose dentistry as his protagonist'south profession because he wanted to write a volume about a man who needs to save himself from despair (or words to that effect) and is exposed to it all twenty-four hour period long. Forth the fashion, the author manages to make oral disuse both terrifying and gut-bustingly funny.
As the book begins, Paul meets a foreign, frantic patient who declares out of nowhere: "I'm an Ulm, and and so are you!" Having no thought what an Ulm is, the dentist dismisses this nut out of hand. Simply the idea that he has some underground heritage makes the tightly wound Paul starting time unraveling. Information technology'due south not long until he has lost his bearings so badly that he asks a dental patient for a stool sample. He gets seriously agitated in front of another patient about not being able to call back which grapheme was which on "Friends." He absently waves instruments in patients' faces while doing such things, which is a very bad way for a dentist to come unstrung.
Epitome
His undoing is partly technological, more often than not religious. The tech meltdown begins as a course of identity theft that may or may not accept been acquired by the Ulm in the office. Soon after the Ulm'south visit — and a section of the book related to this patient is wittily titled "Ersatz Israel," a play on Eretz Israel, the broadest biblical term for that country — an ersatz Dr. Paul O'Rourke begins appearing online, first every bit a Red Sox enthusiast, then every bit a spouter of religious dogma. Mr. Ferris has invented a series of theological passages on which the Ulms, living in State of israel and descended from the aboriginal Amalekites, have based their beliefs, and the fake Paul is at present out proselytizing for them. The real dentist has no selection but to examine whether his ain faith exists and what his behavior are.
"To Rise Once again at a Decent Hour" turns Paul'south history with religion into a riotous comedy of errors. A lot of it has to exercise with his short, unhappy history with girls and women, to whom he has attached himself with most-religious fanaticism that scared them. "Me, I never do anything romantically that doesn't involve blood, fever and the potential for incarceration," he says, and goes on to tell a series of stories that bear that out.
The main ones take to do with a Roman Cosmic girlfriend, Samantha Santacroce, whose family saw him as a stalker — and upped his status to that of Satan once he acknowledged his atheism at the family dinner table. And with Connie, his current office assistant, who permit him imagine himself as an honorary Plotz. That is to say, part of Connie's large, Jewish family.
Though Paul has no legitimate connexion to the Plotzes, he falls in love with the whole crew. He describes himself as "a happy whore at the Plotz dinner table," even if nobody at those meals especially returned his affection. Indeed, Connie'southward Uncle Stuart was deeply suspicious of Paul at first, telling him an unfunny joke most the difference betwixt a Philo-Semite and an anti-Semite: The betoken of the joke is that there's merely one of the two that a Jew can trust. Paul is as dense about this as he is nigh everything else — until his obsession with the Ulms brings him, Uncle Stuart and a crew of hastily introduced secondary characters into investigating how the Ulms' roots fit amidst the Israelites' ancient enemies. In this branch of history, the Hebrews' destruction of the Amalekites still lingers.
In the present, these hostilities have biting resonance. In this novel, they remain as function of what originated as a detective story and much longer book, Mr. Ferris told The Paris Review; he began writing it years ago, and so put it aside for a while. The drastic cuts and inevitable confusion still create bumps in "To Ascent Over again at a Decent Hour," since this was never a book that had whatever easy narrative or philosophical destination. But its wit is so precipitous, its fake-biblical texts ("from the Cantaveticles, cantonments 25-29") so clever and its achieve so big that the messiness doesn't do significant impairment. It's an eminently worthy nominee for the Booker Prize or any other.
This is too the first novel by Mr. Ferris that really lives upward to the reputation he established too quickly. It's a major achievement that far outshines the much-publicized "So Nosotros Came to the Finish," his entertaining simply weightless debut, and "The Unnamed," a baffling, downbeat aberration. Neither of those books anticipated the wonders that turn up in this one.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/books/joshua-ferriss-to-rise-again-at-a-decent-hour.html
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