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American Jewish Fiction plot, which is narrated with the compression of a master of the short story form. The result is a brilliant novel about reading and writing informed by the experiences of a lifelong practitioner, but with none of the navel-gazing or preciousness typical of fiction about fiction. One can only hope that Wolff’s extraordinary book will outlive the contemporaneous, and wholly unrelated, slapstick comedy movie of the same title. Further reading: Somewhat like his protagonist, Wolff didn’t discover he was half-Jewish until he was 19; in his autobiographies, his father’s Jewishness and self-hatred surface only occasionally. This Boy’s Life (1989), an awardwinning memoir, was made into a film starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio (1993). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118pSan Remo Drive By Leslie Epstein HANDSEL BOOKS/OTHER PRESS, 2003. 238 PAGES. Leslie Epstein’s family has always been as interesting as his fiction, if not more so. Epstein is not shy about the fact that his father and uncle, two legendary Hollywood screenwriters, wrote Casablanca; these days, he is even more widely recognized as the father of Theo Epstein, who was, at 28, the youngest ever general manager of a Major League Baseball team, and who led the Red Sox to World Series victories in 2004 and 2007. While sensitive to issues of inheritance and posterity, Epstein’s novels have distanced themselves from his own life and those of his famous relatives—as in the historical novels Pinto and Sons (1990), about a Jewish medical student in the American southwest in the mid-19th century, and especially King of the Jews (1979), which features a leader of the Judenrat in Poland during the Holocaust. In the more recent San Remo Drive, though—which bears the subtitle A Novel from Memory, as well as photographs of the author’s family and home—Epstein plumbs his own childhood. The novel first’s four sections relate semiremembered, semi-imagined episodes from the author’s boyhood, transposed onto a character named Richard Jacobi. Like Epstein, Richard grows up on the same street as the exiled Thomas Mann; like Epstein, he has a famous screenwriter father who dies young, a mentally unhinged younger brother, and an ever-present, glamorous, and warmly loving mother. (Responding to an interviewer’s question as to whether his mother was his most significant influence, Epstein quipped, “Did you read San Remo Drive? . . . Well, there you have it.”) These sections dramatize his father’s persecution by McCarthyists and sudden death as well as the development of Richard’s political consciousness and talent (in a departure from real life, he is a painter, not a writer). A wunderkind who goes to Yale and wins a Rhodes scholarship, Richard struggles to relate to his brother, Barton, a disturbed kid who embraces anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and Buddhism 160 one after the other. Given that his parents aren’t exactly interested in synagogues, Richard’s sense of himself as a Jew arises largely as a reaction to Bartie’s selfhatred and self-abnegation, which in turn are products of anti-Semitism; asked decades later why he chose to identify as a Jew, Richard says, “Because I found out . . . that some very bad people wanted to kill all the Jews” (as if to endorse Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that anti-Semitism creates the Jew). In an outlandish but representative scene, Richard listens to firsthand testimony from an African American plumber and former World War II soldier about the dehumanization of Jews in Nazi concentration camps, while, at the same time, another plumber fondles Richard’s penis. Such inexplicable confusions of sex, horror, and ethnic identity recur throughout the novel. The novel’s second half narrates Richard’s return to his childhood home on San Remo Drive—apparently you can go home again—and his adoption of two Native American sons. On the eve of his departure for France, where his paintings are about to be celebrated, Richard confronts a crisis, reconnects with his muse and former mistress, and loses his mother. Epstein, as usual, can’t resist slapstick humor or a lame pun—a tendency that some find delightful, and others find annoying, in much of his oeuvre—but in San Remo Drive these typical elements of Epstein’s style are tempered by closer attention to verisimilitude, sincerity, and character development. The result is by turns touching, amusing, and confounding, and one of our finest novels about “movie people.” Further reading: In addition to the novels already...

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