Stern:: A Novel

by Bruce Jay Friedman

First published in 1962, Bruce Jay Friedman’s acclaimed first fiction novel, Stern, tells the story of a young Jewish man who relocates his family from the city to the suburbs, where they are besieged by voracious caterpillars and a bigotry that ranges from the genteel snub to outright confrontation.

“An iridescent tour de force...Mr. Friedman’s style is pure delight-supple, carnal, humorous and at times slightly surrealistic.”—The New York Times Book Review

“What makes Friedman more interesting than most of Malamud, Roth and Bellow is the sense he affords of possibilities larger than the doings and undoings of the Jewish urban bourgeois... What makes him more important is that he writes out of viscera instead of cerebrum.”—Nelson Algren in The Nation

“A strange and touching novel...funny and sad at the same time...in the tradition of a Charlie Chaplin movie.”—Time

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Comedy, Jewish, Novels, Literary Fiction

194 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

American 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

Reviews

[Dave Gunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bruce Jay Friedman, totally unrecognized in most literary circles, wrote the movie SPLASH with Tom Hanks, which we can't hold against him, though John Candy was in SPLASH which gives it automatic street cred. STERN has no street cred, so I've been walking around with it in my back pocket for the last two years, hoping someone would steal it. We live in a fairly honest world (it's still in my back pocket), but not a world that recognizes the almost there genius of Bruce Jay Friedman, the worried man's writer.

If STERN doesn't tickle you like it tickles me, pick up ABOUT HARRY TOWNS or his collected short stories. He also wrote the screenplays for film THE HEARTBREAK KID (starting that hairy heart-throb Charles Grodin and a very young Cybill Shepherd) and STIR CRAZY (which pairs Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in a prison rodeo) BTW, any movie with Gene Wilder in prison is automatic street cred.

G.D. you Friedman, you write great films, you write great books, why does no one know who you are?

[david · Rating 1 out of 5]

We are responsible for the diversions we choose. And why do we seek to be entertained? Because we all need a break from wherever or whatever we are. Movies are a quick hit, something that we can imbibe in a couple of hours and return to everyday life. Television is more interactive and we can turn it on or off as we see fit. A dinner out with a glass of wine is also a short splurge. How about a brisk walk or a game of tennis? Also a worthy distraction, and possibly healthy.


But reading a book is an investment. It requires time, it necessitates some skill, and it cannot generally be consumed quickly. It is not a one-night stand. It is a relationship that extends much longer in time than the afore mentioned activities. So when we pick a book to read, we will try, to the best of our abilities, to research it before we become intimate with it. Some stories require a couple of days of our time and other require significantly more of it.


All that 'works well' is based in transactional parity. Quid pro quo.


This book is considered ‘a bible’ of sorts by a specific cadre of comedic writers. I have read nothing but rave reviews of it from writers of humor over the last twenty-five years. I looked so forward to enjoying it. Junk is worth more than this.
There is no plot line, no arc, no beginning, middle or end. No worthy protagonist. There are no funny parts of it to persuade you to read more. But you read it to the end because these quoted professionals, they who make a living from joke construction, all admire it as if it was naan from the beyond.


It is a shame when time is unnecessarily wasted. But wasted it was. I would like to recommend this book to tyrants, abusers, haters, and to all the blue inhabitants of Mars. Indeed, I would want the writers who endorsed it, to eat their croissants backwards.


This book is not inspiring, not well written, and does not even contain a whiff of funny. A reminder to its’ advocates, "camp and gags and laughter are serious business."

Now, who’s zoomin’ who?

[Matthew Budman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first third of Friedman's debut is flat-out brilliant, both insightful and delightfully clever; you'll wonder why he's not regularly mentioned as a peer of Roth, Bellow, and Malamud as an early-'60s novelist exploring American Jewish identity. And then the story turns inward and gets uncomfortable, as well as much less funny, and you find yourself hoping it ends even before it does. Still, Stern is good enough that I'm looking forward to dipping into Friedman's later fiction.

[Javier Avilés · Rating 2 out of 5]

He leído la edición de La Fuga Ediciones con traducción de Rubén Martín Giráldez.
Y me sabe mal que una recomendación de Laura Fernández y del mismo Rubén, me decepcione. Quizás no he sabido entrar en el juego del humor "judaico", quizás esté (yo) agotado tras Woody Allen y Seinfeild-David. No sé.
He podido captar las referencias a Stern que los hermanos Coen volcaron en A serious man, una de las películas que más aprecio de los Coen.
Y ya está.
El humor es muy relativo y subjetivo. Me ha entretenido, pero no entusiasmado.
Lástima.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una maravilla. La novela más divertida que he leído este año. Especialmente indicada para amantes de Joseph Heller y otros crazy writers norteamericanos.

[Mike Randall · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love a good neurotic, and Stern (the character) is up there with the best of them.

[Ben Shakey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man alive! This is a lost classic. Can't believe I hadn't heard of it before.

[🐴 🍖]

there's a vicious (like, eye-wateringly so) review of bjf's later novel the dick in nyt that complains about his "bag of shticks." imo however what he's cataloguing here is less shticks and more tics -- dude's got laser vision for the ways in which ppl can get stuck on the same subroutines like malfunctioning computer programs, or patterns of stereotyped behavior like zoo animals. which is consistently hilarious but also suggests some real uncomfortable truths about commuterus americanus yknow? what keeps this from vaulting into the stratosphere is the malnourished lil final section after stern gets out of the rest home. if the book is stern, part 4 is the ulcer

[Maia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd read a few of Friedman's stories in college (including the very good 'A Change of Plan', the basis for both versions of The Heartbreak Kid, screenplays for both also having been written by him) and found them full of interesting so-called 'black humor' (a label Friedman has been fencing for years) so now that i'm in a 50s, early 60s kick, I thought I'd try his novels.

I enjoyed Stern--was drawn in by the hysteria, the neurosis, the apocalyptic humor, as well as 'another side' to the whole 1950s 'life in suburbia' world, a la John Cheever or Yates' Revolutionary Road. Friedman's world, as a native New Yorker and a Jew, is necessarily and interestingly more urban than Cheever's or Yates'--or, for that matter, that of The Man in The Grey Flannel Suit. This makes it a more contemporary view.

There's something about Friedman's writing, though, that never quite convinces me 100%, as if his scope remains small, his view of humanity rather narrow.

[Lala · Rating 4 out of 5]

This character study will make you very uncomfortable. It describes the neuroses of a man who has moved from New York City to the suburbs. His insecurities and fears are overwhelming his daily life. His Jewish identity is being tested in a anti-semitic atmosphere while his concerns about his family contribute to his breakdown.

As a New Yorker and a Jew, I enjoyed this book.
Although, I'd like to hope that most people would have more strength than the lead character.

[Eleanore · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And it was true that for a while Stern's last concession to his early Jewish days was to stand outside synagogues each year and listen to the ram's horn. It was as though listening to the ancient sound would somehow keep him just the tiniest bit Jewish, in case it turned out someday that a scorecard really was kept on people."

Definitely the most deeply imagined examination of quiet neuroses I've read in a long while, if not ever. Very human, and very funny.

[Eric Woodard]

I liked the first half. It felt like a Cheever novel written by Philip Roth. But in the second half the Cheever went away and the Roth neuroses were overamplified.

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A real laugher. A tad slow and repetitive, but still, it makes you laugh. What more do you want?

[Lee Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

So uneven -- the first half or so is fantastic, exuberant, consistently amusing, something I read in small savoring batches, really appreciating how vivid and comedic yet still also anxious and affecting it all was. For the most part seemed pleasantly dated (seems set in '50s, approximately) but occasionally veers into language and sexual ideation that sensitive contemporary types may consider "uncomfortable." A Jewish man and his wife and son move from NYC to the suburbs and encounter an anti-semitic neighbor who calls Stern's son the k-word and pushes his wife down, his wife not wearing underwear, so the k-word guy gets a glimpse. This indignity drives the rest of the novel, which soon enough delivers some generous backstory (a fantastic scene in a bar, with a larger-than-life storyteller who refers to Stern as the Big Jew, in a mythic way Stern finds acceptable -- really worth tracking this down for that scene, page 71 to 74). And there's some amusing bits with his colleagues in NYC, a gay guy who rates everything and a black intellectual artist guy who Stern tries to talk to about his situation in the suburbs. You can also see the seams of his humor in these scenes, how he introduces and then emphasizes and returns to some mannerism (like rating everything) that becomes a kinda fun schtick. But then the book goes off the rails when Stern checks into a rest home to recover from a nasty ulcer, largely induced by anxiety related to having to deal with the k-word guy mentioned above. It's a long, fully dramatized section, with too many characters and almost no way for me to hang on to them. I skimmed some of this section, admittedly, just completely back on my heels and not finding the attraction or polish or insight of the first 100 pages. And then Stern returns home and has some trouble, wants to sell the house, and confronts the k-word guy -- a solid ending, the family huddled together in something between a group hug and ducking/covering. Glad I read it, and I'm glad I noted the page numbers of that one great scene -- I'm sure I'll return to it. Has such a perfect comedic tone but also seems to express and elevate life and its complexities.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fun, weird, funny and odd book this is; it's ostensibly about a guy who moves his family to the suburbs and has to deal with discrimination, but it's so much more than that. This was my first Bruce Jay Friedman book, and it won't be my last.

Stern (no first name) is a family man who realizes the Great American Dream by transporting his nuclear family out to the suburbs. His dreams come crashing down, however, when his wife reports that a neighbor has knocked her down and used an anti-Jewish slur. Stern then plots a revenge while worrying about an ulcer that may or may not be a result of said plotting. It's all very funny and odd at the same time (the best kind of funny, really), and reminds me a lot of "A Meaningful Life" by L.J. Davis, which centers around the same notion of home-ownership as both a dream and a nightmare (though the ending of Davis' book is far less lighthearted than Friedman's). I started it yesterday and, had I not been sleepy around one last night, would've finished it in a day (but as it was, I only had twenty or so pages left anyway). If you love "Catch-22," "Slaughterhouse-Five," or "A Meaningful Life," this book is right up your alley.

[Gary Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great first novel that entertained while also making me think. Friedman can be compared to Woody Allen, but Friedman was there first. Same for Philip Roth. I thought of Stern as a proto-Portnoy. Friedman is definitely an unsung author of Jewish-American fiction, overlooked along wth the very different but just as insightful Chaim Potok.

I discovered Friedman through his short stories, finding and falling in love with his collection Far From the City of Class. This novel ranks right up there with those "honeys," to use an expression from my favorite story, "When You're Excused You're Excused."

Stern is a put-upon everyman, an insightful man with intellectual ambitions. He moves to the suburbs and finds a snake in Eden--a Jew-hating bully who calls Stern's wife a "kike." Even worse in Stern's mind is that the man pushed his wife and when she fell her skirt came up and she wasn't wearing panties. The thought of this Jew-hating thug--dubbed "kike-man"--having possibly glimpsed his wife's nudity haunts Stern throughout the novel, undoubtedly contributing to his ulcer and subsequent nervous breakdown.

Stern's ulcer and five-week stay in a bargain-rate rest home were the highlight of the novel. The rogues' gallery of characters he meets there were imaginative comic inventions, from Lennie, the black porter with mechanized leg braces that whirr and click, to the half-man, to Rooney of the softened bones, to the wheelchair-bound one-legged Greek. There are fun scenes here with the baseball game and later the poor man's great escape when Stern and a couple patients slip outside the home for a night on the town.

One of the book's weak spots came during that night on the town. There's a surreal barroom brawl, but suddenly it seems as if it were only in Stern's imagination. And Stern's indiscretions with the Puerto Rican hairdresser didn't jibe with his fastidiousness for chastity and modesty, such as his periodic panics about his wife and her dance instructor Juan.

But these are mere bagatelles in an otherwise outstanding novel that deserves to be ranked alongside the best of Bellow and Roth. And Woody Allen.

[Brian Dahlen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is so depressing, . It supposedly describes the human condition, but too me it's just unduly vulgar and bleak, for some unknown reason it reminds me of Camus' "The Stranger" (which I barely remember, it's been decades since I have read it)

To be fair, this was Friedman's first novel and also I'm not a fan of existentialist literature which I suppose this book could be considered.

I say, don't waste your time, but what do I know.

[Diogenes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Slow, and to this reader, not funny. If I want a Caspar Millktoast type of character, no matter how he survives, I'll read Woody Allen. It may be that a member of an ethnic group can get away with writing a stereotypical satire of his own group, but this effort didn't amuse.

[Iletrado · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ligera decepción.

[Eddie · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting and fun... a good read

[Bret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before there were the Coen brothers, there was Bruce Jay Friedman. That’s it. That’s the whole review.

[Les · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing itself is superb. However, the story leaves a lot to be desired. While I understand the racial language was fairly normal for the time when this was written, it still left me uneasy.

[Nick W · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great modern, neurotic comic novel.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A move to the suburbs and subsequent mental institution

[Carlton Duff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very odd book

[Zeltzamer]

Don’t Be Afraid (The Schmuck’s Afraid, Too)

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un "piccolo Giobbe americano degli anni Sessanta." - Guido Fink, La nostra metà del Paradiso, postfazione, p. 201

[Alana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stern, the book's main character, would be at home in early Woody Allen films. His slight story focuses on his angst at being the target of antisemitism, or more specifically a single antisemitic act perpetrated on his wife in the opening pages. The book is at times, funny and sad and just plain strange.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious. A great, funny book following the reluctant adventure of a guy too much of a pussy to confront his bully anti-Semetic neighbor.

[Brent Legault · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Can I begin now?" Stern asked, not wishing to violate any vomiting protocol.