Shrinking: The Beginning of My Own Ending

by Alan Lelchuk

A Delightful Book!

576 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1978

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read up to p362. If novels about oh-so-tortured Jewish white male academics, written by Jewish white male academics, and their adventures in philandering with Native American Indian female students, written in long-winded unpoetic prose, plump with tedious letters to favourite childhood baseball and wrestling players, relatives who never feature in the story, and interminable digressions in which the narrator never experiences a twinge of guilt for cheating on his girlfriend, are the literary experience for you, then step right up to the oeuvre of Alan Lelchuk (clearly, fellow GR members find his other novels [all of which sound the same] to be an equal pleasure as this!) This novel also was a physical pain to read: the hardback binding barely stretched to permit me entry, and the cover art is so hideous that putting the book down made me dread re-lifting. I should have taken heed. I curse the sequence of events that led me to thinking that picking up this particular buried novel was the right move. Keep the shovels locked up.