Joshua Cohen, _The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family_, I

 I'M A FAITHFUL reader of Joshua Cohen going all the way back to Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto. Last April, I was checking around, thinking he was about due for a new book, and saw a new one called The Best Assassination in the Nation. Delighted, I ordered it. When it arrived, I opened it up only to find myself launched on a pedestrian political thriller. Joshua, Joshua, I inwardly lamented, how could you? More careful inspection of the book's back cover, however, revealed that this book was in fact written by a different Joshua Cohen, not the author of Book of Numbers and Witz. Whew. I did not finish the book, but I have been keeping it around just as a reminder to myself not to be such an idiot.

My gratitude was enhanced, therefore, when this summer there appeared a new novel by the echt Joshua Cohen. And it is excellent.

Set mainly over a few days in a small northeastern college town in the early 1960s, The Netanyahus is narrated by Ruben Blum, a new member of the college's WASP-ily patrician history department. He has been assigned the task of squiring Israeli scholar Ben-Zion Netanyahu during his campus visit. Netanyahu (an historical figure, father to "Bibi," longtime prime minister of Israel) is on campus to give a lecture and to interview for a teaching position.

In an afterword, Cohen explains the genesis of the novel lay in the late Harold Bloom's story of having been handed that very assignment back in that day, when Netanyahu père was on the job market in the USA. (Ruben Blum is not based on Harold Bloom, however.)

Cohen had never put me much in mind of Philip Roth before this novel, but this one did on nearly every page. This may have been due to my plowing through the big Roth biography at the same time I was reading The Netanyahus, but I don't think that's all it was. The family comedy of this novel--its scenes of Ruben with his wife, his teenage daughter, his parents, and his in-laws--is explosively funny even when it is painful, as it frequently is. The episode of daughter Judy's finding a way to obtain the nose job that she badly wants but that her parents refuse to allow, for instance, could almost be a lost story from the Goodbye, Columbus era. When the nor'easter of the Netanyahu family lands, with its three sons who seem to have stepped out of Lord of the Flies, we are in the over-the-top farce mode of Portnoy's Complaint, The Great American Novel, and Operation Shylock.

And that wasn't all...but I'll stop here for now.