Sitting shiva has its moment
Sitting shiva has its moment
An old movie, based on an older novel, shows the beauty of a really old ritual.
I am a writer who gets interviewed a lot, but one of the things I am almost never asked is, “What books do you love?” I get why. When I am lecturing or on the radio or whatnot, it’s often to talk about the mass murder of Jews in Pittsburgh, or rising antisemitism, or other highly topical stuff. Understandably, the audience has not turned out to hear my thoughts on sentence structure, the overlooked genius of British novelist Jane Gardam, why Janet Malcolm was more important than Joan Didion, why they should leave Roald Dahl’s prose alone, etc. They want to hear about the world outside their door.
But what writers want to talk about is writing. As a result, I fantasize—that may be too strong a word (but actually maybe it’s not)—about being the subject of one of those Times Book Review interviews, under the rubric “By the Book,” in which the subject gets asked about his or her library, favorite books, how his shelves are organized, what writers he’d invite to a dinner party, etc. If I got to sit for this battery of questions, I’d give some of the usual answers (I do love Fitzgerald, Franzen, Wolitzer, Tartt), but the answer I’d be most excited to give—perhaps to the question, “What’s your favorite book that no one has heard of?”—is “Jonathan Tropper.”
Tropper is hardly obscure. His books are best-sellers. He may have sold more books Marilynne Robinson. He has certainly sold more books to me than Marilynne Robinson (or John Updike, Ta-Nehisi Coates, or James Patterson). He has written six medium-size novels about middle-aged, middle-class men with problems. They are funny, they have no pretensions, and they are serious page-turners. One of them, This Is Where I Leave You (2009) is the subject of a 2014 movie that I always loved, but no one else ever saw, until, weirdly, the past month, when it became the most-streamed movie on Netflix (maybe on the principle that America just loves Jason Bateman).
This Is Where I Leave You is about Judd Foxman (in the movie, Judd Altman—Lord knows why), whose marriage has just fallen apart when his father dies; his mother then forces him and his three angry siblings to come home to Westchester to sit shiva, spend the traditional seven-day Jewish mourning period together. The siblings love each other but can’t stand each other—a not uncommon dynamic. Jason Bateman is Judd; Jane Fonda plays the mother (whether they can play Jewish, or may play Jewish, is a topic for another time).
There is a lot of mockery of shiva; a lot of the excessive food, the inappropriate comments, etc. But if there is a better, more heartfelt depiction of shiva in American literature, I don’t know it (email me with your ideas). I have long noted that most Jewish literature is very light on the Jewish ritual; go search Roth or Bellow for actual ritual, and you will come up nearly empty; Ozick and Malamud are better on that count. But Tropper isn’t aggressively secular the way some of his elders are. He grew up Modern Orthodox, and his familiarity with the rhythms of shiva show.
Here’s one of my favorite passages in the whole book. This is narrated by Judd, at shiva:
Greg Pollan, an old friend of mine from high school, comes by. Our friendship was based almost entirely on our mutual admiration of Clint Eastwood … Now Greg is fat and married and his eyes bulge in their sockets, threatening to pop out and shoot across the room. Triplets, he tells me. A goiter. He is unshaven and tired and he heard an old friend was sitting shiva in the neighborhood and made it his business to come. Even though he’s exhausted and probably could have used the time better just turning up the A.C. in his car and closing his eyes. I try to imagine a situation in which I’d have been equally decent.
That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? What we’re here for, what being a decent person entails. Not changing the world. Just showing up, for someone you don’t have to show up for, at some cost to yourself. When it would have been easier to sleep or watch TV. I find that passage incredibly moving.
I have more to say about a recent shiva call I made, and I’ll say it in my next installment. Meanwhile, go watch the movie on Netflix.
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