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The Peace Process: A Novella and Stories
A brilliant new collection from one of American literature’s most original and hilarious purveyors of dark comedy Silenced by the horrors of Nazi Germany, a Jewish satirist is inspired to write again by his biggest Joseph Goebbels. A retired English teacher dies on the operating table and wakes up to an afterlife in which literature does not exist; he can claim any masterpiece as his own, from The Catcher in the Rye to Crime and Punishment—if only he can remember what actually happens in those stories. On his first trip to the Holy Land, a down-on-his-luck filmmaker reluctantly agrees to help a young Israeli Arab escape to New York, only to watch in dismay as the upstart lands a buxom, Yiddish-speaking girlfriend and a monster movie deal. Mario Puzo once said that the world of Bruce Jay Friedman’s short fiction is “like a Twilight Zone with Charlie Chaplin.” Ironic, clever, perceptive, and hysterical, The Peace Process is vintage Friedman—fourteen finely crafted tales that take dead aim at the sweet spot between pleasure and pain.
- GenresShort Stories
254 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 13, 2015
5 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Jay Friedman
61 books46 followersAmerican comic author whose dark, mocking humour and social criticism was directed at the concerns and behaviour of American Jews.
After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1951 with a B.A. in journalism and serving in the U.S. Air Force for two years, Friedman worked in publishing for several years before achieving success with his first novel, Stern (1962). The title character is a luckless descendent of the biblical Job, unable to assimilate into mainstream American life. Virtually all of Friedman's works are a variation on this theme; most of his characters are Jewish by birth, but they feel alienated from both Jewish and American culture. His works are also noted for focusing on absurd characters and situations.
-Encyclopædia Britannica
After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1951 with a B.A. in journalism and serving in the U.S. Air Force for two years, Friedman worked in publishing for several years before achieving success with his first novel, Stern (1962). The title character is a luckless descendent of the biblical Job, unable to assimilate into mainstream American life. Virtually all of Friedman's works are a variation on this theme; most of his characters are Jewish by birth, but they feel alienated from both Jewish and American culture. His works are also noted for focusing on absurd characters and situations.
-Encyclopædia Britannica
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 26, 2016
I enjoyed this one. It had me laughing in quite a few spots. Friedman has that absurd edge that puts him in a similar place to Bioy Casares or Kurt Vonnegut. It's that type of writing that deserves to be savored because each word has to be chosen carefully to achieve that faint touch of absurdity without going into excess.
August 29, 2015
The Peace Process is actually a collection of short stories plus one novella at the end. The writing is edgy all the way through and in a number of places it’s very, very funny. Thank you to Net Galley and Open Road Integrated Media for providing me with a DRC to read in advance. This collection will be available to the public October 13.
If any work of fiction you have read in the past five years or so has offended you in any way, the first selection in this collection is guaranteed to do so. It did me. Frankly, I am such a consistently fast, thorough reviewer that I could blow one off right now if I was disturbed enough by it, and I came pretty close. I don’t like to spoil things, but at the same time you ought to be warned. Is incest—even imagined incest, and with details—offensive to you? Is there a way to make a boy’s graphically imagined incest with an older sister acceptable, even funny? If so, then this is your collection. As for me, I almost wrote to the publishers to tell them that I wasn’t reading or reviewing one more story in this nasty little book; fortunately for me, I looked at the table of contents, figured out how much more of the book there was left to read, and decided to stick with it for one more story. And the next story, “The Storyteller”, was funny enough that I forgot—well, almost forgot--how mad I’d been a few minutes before.
But I seriously question the editor’s choice to put that one dreadful story right up front. It’s almost like begging the reader to throw the book out the window.
Moving on, the writing in all the other stories, from the second on through the last, is really strong. My imaginary red teacher’s pen sometimes comes out when I’m reading a galley, and I’ll think how much better the work would be if we could just nip this part here and take a meat-axe to another section. Not so for Friedman. Every word is well chosen, and the pacing is taut and brisk. Besides “The Storyteller”, my other favorites were “The Choice” and “The Strainer”. The endings always surprised me, and a couple of times, had I not had someone sleeping beside me as I read, I would have moaned aloud when I reached the denouement.
If I were to advise someone with tastes like my own as to whether to read the collection or leave it go, I would say get the book; skip the first story; read the rest of it. But then, you have to decide these things for yourself. I’ve done what I can, and the rest is up to you.
For fans of edgy, dark fiction, recommended with the caveat mentioned.
If any work of fiction you have read in the past five years or so has offended you in any way, the first selection in this collection is guaranteed to do so. It did me. Frankly, I am such a consistently fast, thorough reviewer that I could blow one off right now if I was disturbed enough by it, and I came pretty close. I don’t like to spoil things, but at the same time you ought to be warned. Is incest—even imagined incest, and with details—offensive to you? Is there a way to make a boy’s graphically imagined incest with an older sister acceptable, even funny? If so, then this is your collection. As for me, I almost wrote to the publishers to tell them that I wasn’t reading or reviewing one more story in this nasty little book; fortunately for me, I looked at the table of contents, figured out how much more of the book there was left to read, and decided to stick with it for one more story. And the next story, “The Storyteller”, was funny enough that I forgot—well, almost forgot--how mad I’d been a few minutes before.
But I seriously question the editor’s choice to put that one dreadful story right up front. It’s almost like begging the reader to throw the book out the window.
Moving on, the writing in all the other stories, from the second on through the last, is really strong. My imaginary red teacher’s pen sometimes comes out when I’m reading a galley, and I’ll think how much better the work would be if we could just nip this part here and take a meat-axe to another section. Not so for Friedman. Every word is well chosen, and the pacing is taut and brisk. Besides “The Storyteller”, my other favorites were “The Choice” and “The Strainer”. The endings always surprised me, and a couple of times, had I not had someone sleeping beside me as I read, I would have moaned aloud when I reached the denouement.
If I were to advise someone with tastes like my own as to whether to read the collection or leave it go, I would say get the book; skip the first story; read the rest of it. But then, you have to decide these things for yourself. I’ve done what I can, and the rest is up to you.
For fans of edgy, dark fiction, recommended with the caveat mentioned.
November 27, 2025
Bruce Jay Friedman’s The Peace Process is one of those rare collections where the absurd feels more truthful than realism, and the realism feels so brittle that it cracks into absurdity.
Friedman—forever the sly diagnostician of American male neuroses—composes his stories like a series of delicate detonations. Nothing explodes outright; instead, everything slowly bulges, strains, and finally bursts in a muted puff of existential dust. And in that puff lies the peculiar pleasure of his art.
The novella that gives the book its title sets the tone: here is a world where negotiation is not merely political but metaphysical.
Ordinary men wander through bureaucratic purgatories, trying to bargain their way out of loneliness, guilt, and identity collapse. Friedman has always been a writer fascinated by men who misread the terms of their own existence, and in The Peace Process his protagonists function like diplomats attempting to sign treaties with their own worst impulses.
They want simple resolutions—peace, reconciliation, a clean emotional ledger—but the machinery of their inner lives has already been sabotaged by desire, cultural disorientation, and a lingering sense of cosmic slapstick.
The stories operate in a tonal register that oscillates between the deadpan and the hysterical. One moment the writing feels like an understated New Yorker vignette; the next, it morphs into a Kafkaesque prank where the punchline is the protagonist’s entire worldview.
Friedman’s method is razor-sharp: he takes the small terrors of urban, middle-class American life—job insecurity, marital erosion, generational drift—and refracts them through a lens of low-key surrealism. The result is not fantasy; it is the nightmare hidden beneath the fluorescent light of the everyday.
His characters populate the borderlands between emotional clarity and farce. They keep trying to articulate their dilemmas, but language fools them every time. Dialogues twist into knots, misunderstandings metastasise, and self-analysis becomes yet another trap.
Friedman’s humour is neither comforting nor cynical; it is the humour of someone who recognises that core human emotions—envy, lust, ambition, shame—are fundamentally unmanageable. And yet his tone never curdles into despair. Instead, he offers a kind of compassionate mischief, as though telling us: yes, we’re all ridiculous, but at least we’re ridiculous together.
What elevates the book is the precision of Friedman’s cultural memory. These stories shimmer with the psychological aftershocks of late-20th-century American life: the dying confidence of the postwar worldview, the rise of corporate alienation, the erosion of romantic scripts, and the increasing absurdity of gender performance.
Friedman never lectures. Instead, he dramatises these shifts through miniature crises—an overheard remark, a botched appointment, a misguided attempt at self-reinvention. And from these small moments he extracts an entire anthropology of the anxious modern subject.
At a craft level, Friedman remains a master of timing. His paragraphs are calibrated like dramatic beats; he knows exactly when to undercut a moment with irony and when to let the emotional tremor resonate. Even the most bizarre events have a sense of inevitability, as if the universe itself were in on the joke. And yet the joke is never mean-spirited.
Friedman’s worldview is secular, humane, mischievously sceptical, and deeply curious about how people try—and fail—to make meaning.
Perhaps the most memorable aspect of The Peace Process is the way the stories accumulate a quiet emotional force. Beneath the surface anticness lies a keen understanding of aging, vulnerability, and the fragile dreams of adulthood.
The humour is a mask, but only partially; through its eyeholes we glimpse the bewilderment of people who no longer trust the narrative of their own lives. In the end, the book becomes a negotiation not between nations but between incompatible selves.
There is no final treaty, no definitive peace. But there is a kind of fragile truce: the recognition that our contradictions are the only stable territory we possess.
Friedman—forever the sly diagnostician of American male neuroses—composes his stories like a series of delicate detonations. Nothing explodes outright; instead, everything slowly bulges, strains, and finally bursts in a muted puff of existential dust. And in that puff lies the peculiar pleasure of his art.
The novella that gives the book its title sets the tone: here is a world where negotiation is not merely political but metaphysical.
Ordinary men wander through bureaucratic purgatories, trying to bargain their way out of loneliness, guilt, and identity collapse. Friedman has always been a writer fascinated by men who misread the terms of their own existence, and in The Peace Process his protagonists function like diplomats attempting to sign treaties with their own worst impulses.
They want simple resolutions—peace, reconciliation, a clean emotional ledger—but the machinery of their inner lives has already been sabotaged by desire, cultural disorientation, and a lingering sense of cosmic slapstick.
The stories operate in a tonal register that oscillates between the deadpan and the hysterical. One moment the writing feels like an understated New Yorker vignette; the next, it morphs into a Kafkaesque prank where the punchline is the protagonist’s entire worldview.
Friedman’s method is razor-sharp: he takes the small terrors of urban, middle-class American life—job insecurity, marital erosion, generational drift—and refracts them through a lens of low-key surrealism. The result is not fantasy; it is the nightmare hidden beneath the fluorescent light of the everyday.
His characters populate the borderlands between emotional clarity and farce. They keep trying to articulate their dilemmas, but language fools them every time. Dialogues twist into knots, misunderstandings metastasise, and self-analysis becomes yet another trap.
Friedman’s humour is neither comforting nor cynical; it is the humour of someone who recognises that core human emotions—envy, lust, ambition, shame—are fundamentally unmanageable. And yet his tone never curdles into despair. Instead, he offers a kind of compassionate mischief, as though telling us: yes, we’re all ridiculous, but at least we’re ridiculous together.
What elevates the book is the precision of Friedman’s cultural memory. These stories shimmer with the psychological aftershocks of late-20th-century American life: the dying confidence of the postwar worldview, the rise of corporate alienation, the erosion of romantic scripts, and the increasing absurdity of gender performance.
Friedman never lectures. Instead, he dramatises these shifts through miniature crises—an overheard remark, a botched appointment, a misguided attempt at self-reinvention. And from these small moments he extracts an entire anthropology of the anxious modern subject.
At a craft level, Friedman remains a master of timing. His paragraphs are calibrated like dramatic beats; he knows exactly when to undercut a moment with irony and when to let the emotional tremor resonate. Even the most bizarre events have a sense of inevitability, as if the universe itself were in on the joke. And yet the joke is never mean-spirited.
Friedman’s worldview is secular, humane, mischievously sceptical, and deeply curious about how people try—and fail—to make meaning.
Perhaps the most memorable aspect of The Peace Process is the way the stories accumulate a quiet emotional force. Beneath the surface anticness lies a keen understanding of aging, vulnerability, and the fragile dreams of adulthood.
The humour is a mask, but only partially; through its eyeholes we glimpse the bewilderment of people who no longer trust the narrative of their own lives. In the end, the book becomes a negotiation not between nations but between incompatible selves.
There is no final treaty, no definitive peace. But there is a kind of fragile truce: the recognition that our contradictions are the only stable territory we possess.
November 24, 2022
I’ve been a Bruce J. Friedman fan since I first read (and subsequently reread, twice) A Mother’s Kisses years ago. I was hard put to characterize his genre until I found the exact phrase in Michael Res’ review of this collection, The Peace Process; absurdist humor is what produces a sentence like "Though his personal life was troubled, he owned vast properties in Central America and had amassed the world’s largest collection of stun guns". The short stories that I most enjoyed were "Nightgown" and, especially, “The Choice.” The title story (actually a novella), “The Peace Process,” did not have the currently fashionable “twist” at the end - it was tangled from get-go.
My recommendation is that you pick one of The Peace Process’ short stories at random and if can’t stand it, don’t waste any more time. They’re all that way.
My recommendation is that you pick one of The Peace Process’ short stories at random and if can’t stand it, don’t waste any more time. They’re all that way.
July 5, 2016
I’m a longtime fan of Bruce Jay Friedman, and I think that A Mother’s Kisses is the second or third funniest novel I have ever read (behind Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and any of Mordecai Richler’s best).
That’s the thing about Friedman, in the likely case you aren’t familiar with his work. Excellent as it is, he always seems overshadowed. The man gets credit for inventing the term “black humor;” his novel, Stern, more or less created the literary model for making fun of the Jewish mother. And, in a mid-career gambit, he wrote the screenplay for the movie Splash and became, for a time, a Hollywood honcho. But admit it, you’ve never heard of him.
Remarkably, he’s still going strong. Good for him that this generally engaging book has come out after Roth has announced his retirement and years after Richler died. He was the earliest of that distinguished crew, and here he is the last man standing (or, as the case may be, sitting at the keyboard).
Friedman’s voice is utterly distinctive. He has a narrative gift for cutting all the fat out of his beginnings, and I’ve tried to learn some of his technique just by looking at his first paragraphs; they move so quickly from seemingly random insight to fully established context that, even though I follow the story perfectly, I feel I’ve been treated to a literary sleight of hand.
But even more distinctive is the tone. Friedman always seems like that crotchety guy who hates everyone but who, seeming to hate you less than all the other “putzes” in the room, confides in you. And it’s flattering. The guy doesn’t know how not to be clever, and all his narrators come across as worth listening to.
What’s even more surprising here – though it’s part of a fair bit of his earlier work too – is the degree to which his stories veer into genuine self-reflection. The main characters have almost always made a serious mistake – one has impulsively stolen jewelry from a doddering octogenarian, another discovers he has accidentally befriended the man who broke up his first marriage decades before, and another has just written a new movie scene that his wife recognizes as based on her – and they want to reflect on it, want to learn from it. They tend to avoid regret; instead, they ponder, and they take you along for that pondering.
As stories, most of these are almost extended jokes. Many end with what amounts to a punch line, not so much resolving the narrative (although they often do) as wryly releasing you from the hold of the opening lines. As such, most of these are mood pieces, explorations on a theme of distant disappointment. There are lot of ex-wives, a lot of petered out movie careers, a lot of children (or parents or siblings) who’ve drifted apart from close family members, but there are real differences between the narrators as well. Read the stories consecutively – in the best of ways the material flies by – and you’ll feel as if you’ve hung out at a good old-fashioned deli.
My favorites are “The Big Sister,” (about a man trying to figure out how to mourn his only sibling), “A Fan is a Fan” (about a Jewish writer in Nazi Germany with the mixed blessing of having Joseph Goebbels as a major fan), and “The Nightgown” (about a man who, so enjoying an actor’s performance as a psychiatrist, hires him as a shrink.) There are a couple of lemons here – “Where She Stops” and “Orange Shoes” disappointed me the most – but it’s otherwise a consistently strong collection.
I’m still unsure how to feel about the title story, one that takes up more than a third of the entire book. On the one hand, I admire Friedman’s willingness to interrogate Jewish anti-Muslim attitudes, but I can’t be certain what he is telling me through his ruminations. The vicissitudes of the narrator’s relationship to an Arab he meets during his first trip to Israel leave him sometimes a benefactor and sometimes a recipient. That part is fantasy, or farce, that moves quickly and, for the most part, with the same cleverness of the other stories.
It feels as if there’s a deeper message to the narrative, if for no reason other than that it’s so much longer than the others, but it’s buried under so much irony that I can’t pull it out in any straight fashion. Friedman may have something shrewd to say about Jewish self-righteousness, and he may be making the even bolder claim that the “new Jew” – the new plucky underdog – is the Arab. Both feel possible, but neither feels quite right. Either way, I’m left laughing, and I’m left thinking.
The book as a whole definitely works, and it’s good to have the old pro still at it.
That’s the thing about Friedman, in the likely case you aren’t familiar with his work. Excellent as it is, he always seems overshadowed. The man gets credit for inventing the term “black humor;” his novel, Stern, more or less created the literary model for making fun of the Jewish mother. And, in a mid-career gambit, he wrote the screenplay for the movie Splash and became, for a time, a Hollywood honcho. But admit it, you’ve never heard of him.
Remarkably, he’s still going strong. Good for him that this generally engaging book has come out after Roth has announced his retirement and years after Richler died. He was the earliest of that distinguished crew, and here he is the last man standing (or, as the case may be, sitting at the keyboard).
Friedman’s voice is utterly distinctive. He has a narrative gift for cutting all the fat out of his beginnings, and I’ve tried to learn some of his technique just by looking at his first paragraphs; they move so quickly from seemingly random insight to fully established context that, even though I follow the story perfectly, I feel I’ve been treated to a literary sleight of hand.
But even more distinctive is the tone. Friedman always seems like that crotchety guy who hates everyone but who, seeming to hate you less than all the other “putzes” in the room, confides in you. And it’s flattering. The guy doesn’t know how not to be clever, and all his narrators come across as worth listening to.
What’s even more surprising here – though it’s part of a fair bit of his earlier work too – is the degree to which his stories veer into genuine self-reflection. The main characters have almost always made a serious mistake – one has impulsively stolen jewelry from a doddering octogenarian, another discovers he has accidentally befriended the man who broke up his first marriage decades before, and another has just written a new movie scene that his wife recognizes as based on her – and they want to reflect on it, want to learn from it. They tend to avoid regret; instead, they ponder, and they take you along for that pondering.
As stories, most of these are almost extended jokes. Many end with what amounts to a punch line, not so much resolving the narrative (although they often do) as wryly releasing you from the hold of the opening lines. As such, most of these are mood pieces, explorations on a theme of distant disappointment. There are lot of ex-wives, a lot of petered out movie careers, a lot of children (or parents or siblings) who’ve drifted apart from close family members, but there are real differences between the narrators as well. Read the stories consecutively – in the best of ways the material flies by – and you’ll feel as if you’ve hung out at a good old-fashioned deli.
My favorites are “The Big Sister,” (about a man trying to figure out how to mourn his only sibling), “A Fan is a Fan” (about a Jewish writer in Nazi Germany with the mixed blessing of having Joseph Goebbels as a major fan), and “The Nightgown” (about a man who, so enjoying an actor’s performance as a psychiatrist, hires him as a shrink.) There are a couple of lemons here – “Where She Stops” and “Orange Shoes” disappointed me the most – but it’s otherwise a consistently strong collection.
I’m still unsure how to feel about the title story, one that takes up more than a third of the entire book. On the one hand, I admire Friedman’s willingness to interrogate Jewish anti-Muslim attitudes, but I can’t be certain what he is telling me through his ruminations. The vicissitudes of the narrator’s relationship to an Arab he meets during his first trip to Israel leave him sometimes a benefactor and sometimes a recipient. That part is fantasy, or farce, that moves quickly and, for the most part, with the same cleverness of the other stories.
It feels as if there’s a deeper message to the narrative, if for no reason other than that it’s so much longer than the others, but it’s buried under so much irony that I can’t pull it out in any straight fashion. Friedman may have something shrewd to say about Jewish self-righteousness, and he may be making the even bolder claim that the “new Jew” – the new plucky underdog – is the Arab. Both feel possible, but neither feels quite right. Either way, I’m left laughing, and I’m left thinking.
The book as a whole definitely works, and it’s good to have the old pro still at it.
August 18, 2016
They Are What They Are
I'm a bit conflicted here, so I'll just offer my thoughts and wish you the best of luck. I like and admire the stories in this book, but ultimately many of them blend together to form a single story in the voice of one more or less all purpose narrator who is telling the same basic tale, just with varied trimmings. That tale touches on regret, ambition, failure, success, loneliness, aging, love, lust, loss and bemused resignation. The varied trimmings come in the form of odd, antic, or precious set-ups, but the rueful punchlines all fall comfortably into the Roth/Richler/Allen category.
That's fine. Friedman was one of the first to explore this territory and he carved out a good bit of it for himself. He always delivers, with greater or lesser success, the same sort of story and resolution - a shrug, a sort of literate screw-you, or a smirk that might be a smile. That might be enough. For what it's worth, though, I found that the most interesting, entertaining and rewarding stories in the collection, to me, were ones that moved away from mocking the same old suspects and tried to go somewhere different. For example, in one story the narrator, in an odd literature-less afterlife, can claim any book he wants as his own, if only he can remember enough of it to describe it fully. His complete failure to actually recall any of the classics he has read, and his flailing attempts to do so, which feel like a junior high schooler faking a test question in Intro to Literature, is brutal and bracingly funny. This wasn't the same old same old, and there's enough of that sort of freshness and creativity to elevate the whole collection.
So, I get it that Friedman is a reliable and accomplished craftsman. I get it that this is old school New York dark humor. I get it that this is subtle humor with the occasional side of meanness. If that were all we had here it would be a fine but fairly predictable collection, and worthy but maybe not exciting. Since there are a few stories that go beyond the predictable and attempt more than retracing well worn paths, this is more interesting than I feared and a better choice than I expected.
(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)
I'm a bit conflicted here, so I'll just offer my thoughts and wish you the best of luck. I like and admire the stories in this book, but ultimately many of them blend together to form a single story in the voice of one more or less all purpose narrator who is telling the same basic tale, just with varied trimmings. That tale touches on regret, ambition, failure, success, loneliness, aging, love, lust, loss and bemused resignation. The varied trimmings come in the form of odd, antic, or precious set-ups, but the rueful punchlines all fall comfortably into the Roth/Richler/Allen category.
That's fine. Friedman was one of the first to explore this territory and he carved out a good bit of it for himself. He always delivers, with greater or lesser success, the same sort of story and resolution - a shrug, a sort of literate screw-you, or a smirk that might be a smile. That might be enough. For what it's worth, though, I found that the most interesting, entertaining and rewarding stories in the collection, to me, were ones that moved away from mocking the same old suspects and tried to go somewhere different. For example, in one story the narrator, in an odd literature-less afterlife, can claim any book he wants as his own, if only he can remember enough of it to describe it fully. His complete failure to actually recall any of the classics he has read, and his flailing attempts to do so, which feel like a junior high schooler faking a test question in Intro to Literature, is brutal and bracingly funny. This wasn't the same old same old, and there's enough of that sort of freshness and creativity to elevate the whole collection.
So, I get it that Friedman is a reliable and accomplished craftsman. I get it that this is old school New York dark humor. I get it that this is subtle humor with the occasional side of meanness. If that were all we had here it would be a fine but fairly predictable collection, and worthy but maybe not exciting. Since there are a few stories that go beyond the predictable and attempt more than retracing well worn paths, this is more interesting than I feared and a better choice than I expected.
(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)
October 13, 2015
Thank You to Open Road Media for providing me with an advanced copy of Bruce Jay Friedman's The Peace Process, in exchange for an honest review.
PLOT - The Peace Process is comprised of thirteen short stories, and a novella, which is the namesake of the collection. Often humerous and frequently involving characters in the arts, Friedman tackles a wide range of human interaction, including all manner of relationships; romantic, business, family, international politics...he doesn't shy away from the difficult or absurd.
LIKE- Friedman writes heavy topics in a way that's very accessible. He uses humor to add levity to some very weighty, and often downright horrific scenarios. Additionally, he has a style of writing that I found accessible. It's direct, with clear characters and vivid description, but void of flowery prose. Not a single word is superfluous.
Friedman creates engaging plots, but his characters are what really shines. He has a knack for putting his characters in terrible moral dilemmas, like in his novella, The Peace Process, where his Jewish-American protagonist finds himself scouting movie locations in Israel, where he attacks a low-class Israeli Arab. Feeling remorse for his actions (especially when the Arab is nothing but kind in return), he tries to make it up to the man by attempting to smuggle him out of the country and into New York.
The Storyteller, with its Twilight Zone vibe was easily my favorite story. English Teacher Alan Dowling has died during surgery and his afterlife is void of literature. He can be famous in the afterlife by stealing a great work of literature, and claiming it as his own. The golden ring is his to grab, if only he can remember the plots of these famous stories.
DISLIKE- I was unevenly interested in the stories, very hit and miss. To be sure, there was more I liked, than disliked, but there were several that failed to keep my attention.
RECOMMEND- Yes. There is much to admire in Friedman's collection; his quirky sense of humor, unique perspective, and vivid characters. Although I wasn't "wowed" by every story, I'm left with enough of a positive impression to recommend The Peace Process.
Like my review? Check out my blog!
PLOT - The Peace Process is comprised of thirteen short stories, and a novella, which is the namesake of the collection. Often humerous and frequently involving characters in the arts, Friedman tackles a wide range of human interaction, including all manner of relationships; romantic, business, family, international politics...he doesn't shy away from the difficult or absurd.
LIKE- Friedman writes heavy topics in a way that's very accessible. He uses humor to add levity to some very weighty, and often downright horrific scenarios. Additionally, he has a style of writing that I found accessible. It's direct, with clear characters and vivid description, but void of flowery prose. Not a single word is superfluous.
Friedman creates engaging plots, but his characters are what really shines. He has a knack for putting his characters in terrible moral dilemmas, like in his novella, The Peace Process, where his Jewish-American protagonist finds himself scouting movie locations in Israel, where he attacks a low-class Israeli Arab. Feeling remorse for his actions (especially when the Arab is nothing but kind in return), he tries to make it up to the man by attempting to smuggle him out of the country and into New York.
The Storyteller, with its Twilight Zone vibe was easily my favorite story. English Teacher Alan Dowling has died during surgery and his afterlife is void of literature. He can be famous in the afterlife by stealing a great work of literature, and claiming it as his own. The golden ring is his to grab, if only he can remember the plots of these famous stories.
DISLIKE- I was unevenly interested in the stories, very hit and miss. To be sure, there was more I liked, than disliked, but there were several that failed to keep my attention.
RECOMMEND- Yes. There is much to admire in Friedman's collection; his quirky sense of humor, unique perspective, and vivid characters. Although I wasn't "wowed" by every story, I'm left with enough of a positive impression to recommend The Peace Process.
Like my review? Check out my blog!
July 7, 2016
Ridiculous
I guess this author is pretty legendary but I had never even heard of him before reading this book. I'm sure a lot of things went over my head, especially a lot of the political references but it didn't do anything to stop me from thoroughly enjoying these stories. The author has a razor-sharp wit and I laughed pretty mightily and often while reading this. If you like absurdist humor you will love this, especially the novella at the end! It'll be some time before I get the image of Naomi Glickstein out of my head. God, those breasts!
I guess this author is pretty legendary but I had never even heard of him before reading this book. I'm sure a lot of things went over my head, especially a lot of the political references but it didn't do anything to stop me from thoroughly enjoying these stories. The author has a razor-sharp wit and I laughed pretty mightily and often while reading this. If you like absurdist humor you will love this, especially the novella at the end! It'll be some time before I get the image of Naomi Glickstein out of my head. God, those breasts!
August 6, 2021
I've heard that Friedman influenced Larry David, and after reading Peace Process I completely understand the connection. Many of the stories made me laugh at loud, something I haven't done since reading B.J. Novak's One More Thing. These stories are truly a delight and if you have a dark sense of humor like me, you will appreciates Friedman's writing. I'm looking forward to going back and reading his older books.
July 2, 2015
I received an ARC of this collection through NetGalley in exchange for an honest & original review.
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June 28, 2016Review by Martin Green for the Jewish Book Council.
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