Do the affluent and over-educated have problems? - The Jewish Chronicle

It’s high praise when the novel I’m reviewing keeps being pilfered by my husband. The only other book to which that has happened recently was Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise. And it’s fair to say Andrew Ridker’s Hope is playing in similar territory, irreverently exploring a contemporary American Jewry that has come adrift, through characters for whom success and stability have become a kind of prison.

Hope lacks Brodesser-Akner’s bite, but it’s still eminently readable, masterfully satirising the non-problems of the affluent and over-educated. Reading it is like watching a car crash in motion, as the four members of the Greenspan family witness the painstakingly constructed edifices of their lives collapse over the course of a year.

Ridker has a particular talent for zooming in on tiny biographical details that bring a minor character to life, so that every anecdote captivates

There’s Scott, respected physician and all-round mensch until a pesky case of malpractice derails his career, and his wife Deb, doyenne of every Boston community charity, and all-round perfect matriarch, until she leaves her husband for another women. And then the next generation: intellectual Maya, finding that adult life doesn’t quite live up to adolescent fantasy, and painfully awkward Gideon, heading for a medical career if he can just get out of his own way. The ideal American Jewish family, imploding just when they have it all.

We’re in 2013, Obama-era America and Hope certainly feels a product of its setting, and not just because of the title. Nothing seems to have much of a consequence, the Greenspans’ problems are material rather than existential. They seem to largely land on their feet, even Gideon, whose story veers to the absurd by the end.

It does deal in cliches, particularly about women – the overbearing mother-in-law, the bored wife creating fiefdoms via synagogue committees, the flighty daughter whose career ambitions come second to her messy romantic life. Balabusta Deb in particular is problematic: when her children struggle, her response is a cartoonish “what did I do wrong?”. And the scenes set in Israel read as if they are written by an American who has never actually spent much time there; apart from anything else, tours don’t tend to jump directly from the Golan Heights to Masada.

Nevertheless, it’s funny, riotously so at times, and Ridker has a particular talent for zooming in on tiny biographical details that bring a minor character to life, so that every anecdote captivates. This is not the next Fleishman, and I don’t think it’s the definitive novel about the American Jewish experience, not least because the questions being asked in 2013 feel a long way from the ones being discussed now. For the most part, the Greenspans inhabit a bubble, rarely pierced by world events. But then, maybe that’s the point, maybe that’s what being an American Jew was like until recently.

Hope

By Andrew Ridker

Duckworth, £10.99

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