Puddingstone

by Mark Jay Mirsky

Puddingstone goes to the heart of Boston’s “savage geography” in the last half of the Twentieth Century. Mark Jay Mirsky, whose Blue Hill Avenue was praised by The Boston Globe as “one of the 100 essential books about New England,” has concocted a hot pudding out of the simmering racial and ethnic animosities in the city. Centered in the districts around its historic Franklin Park, Jews, Irish, African Americans, Yankee bankers, and the last of its native Ponkapoag Indians, join in a general assault on the civic peace. In a battle during the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade and a riot in Charleston’s projects the smoldering resentments burst out but turn into a vision of Kabbalah and the Tain Bo Culaigne as the rabble of the city, together with its police, Cardinal, Mayor, psychiatrists, rabbis and reverends go at each other. Moments from the Irish cattle epics, 13th century mystical texts, Boston politics and gang wars flash against the skyline. The candied puddingstone, squeezed together by the retreating glaciers of a distant ice age, splits apart in the heat of this while the gates of the zoo and insane asylum open to rain madness on the city and dissolve it in Messianic fantasies.Puddingstone’s events are filtered through the story of a Hebrew-school dropout, Maishe Ostropol, who returns to Boston and its suburbs as a popular Reform rabbi advocating new religious practices. The rabbi throws his congregation into turmoil then disappears on a tour with its Sisterhood of Jewish sites in Europe. When Maishe mysteriously finds his way back to his childhood neighborhood on Blue Hill Avenue and disappears into its Franklin Park, the city of Boston begins to shake with the birth pangs of Utopia.

ebook

First published July 16, 2014

Reviews

[Boris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Mirsky is the Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Blue Hill Avenue.
I knew all these people.

[Jason Trask · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "The Birth of Tragedy," Nietzsche writes that great art is the marriage of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. In other words, great art partakes of one's inner party animal as well as one's inner Kant. Lesser art, on the other hand, is influenced by one or the other, but not both. Mark Jay Mirsky skillfully blends both elements in "Puddingstone," his most recently published novel.

It's easy to overlook how ambitious this work is, possibly because of the tone of much of the book. "Mirl's Mother," the first actual chapter of the novel, is an extended kvetch by a very funny Jewish mother-in-law about her son-in-law, Maishe, a rabbi who's either schizophrenic or the messiah, depending... There's something extremely authentic about all of the chapters that this mother-in-law narrates. You can hear her voice--her physical voice--so clearly in your head that it's easy to forget prose like this doesn't just happen:

"I never said a word of what I knew to anyone, a confidante I was, to this moment, a safe, my mouth, I threw away the combination..."

That said, the whole book is good, not just her chapters. In "The Doctor" a psychiatrist gives a speech "for four hundred dollars a head" to the members of a synagogue about, Maishe, their crazy rabbi:

"This from Rabbi [Maishe] Ostropol who titillated Brookline with 'Bring Home Ham for Passover,' gave at Hancock Hall a lecture, `God is dead, so take His place,' astounded a businessman's luncheon with Laban and Labor Value...."

And from that same speech:

"Gottenyu! God is sick. You didn't know that. Before you begin with the `God is dead' business, you got to have God sick. An old story--you didn't hear out in Newton, at the country club, the swimming pool. You forgot what your parents, grandparents knew. An old story among Jews. We're sick, so God is sick. The sicker we are, the sicker He is. We're sicking with Him."

Puddingstone feels so personal at times that I suspect no one but Mirsky could have written it. Actually, Grace Paley might have told the story to Thomas Pynchon who might have written it from memory, but only with heavy editing and commentary by Mel Brooks. I'm not a fast reader, but there were places where my eyes just zoomed along because the prose was so energized and tangle-free. Moreover, the novel is very funny—at times in a slapstick sort of way.

But that's not all it is. As I said, it's ambitious. It's about Judaism, The Torah, The Zohar, The Kabbalah, The Talmud, Hebrew, and Yiddish. It's about Boston, the police, Franklin Park, about race and ethnicity, race riots--in fact, the unrest in Ferguson was just beginning as I was reading this, and I nearly confused the novel with the news. It's about Maishe and Mirl and Mirl's mother and Rochelle. But like I said, it feels personal, so I suspect it's also about Mirsky.

Though I know even less about Kabbalah than Madonna, I found Puddingstone to be a very enjoyable, 5 star read.

http://www.amazon.com/Puddingstone-Fr...