Ben Katchor is a cartoonist whose first collection, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, was instantly (and deservedly) inaugurated into the ranks of Great Contemporary Jewish Novelists: Nicole Krauss, Dara Horn, Michael Chabon, even though his work resembled (gasp!) a comic book. His sensibility, on the other hand, is much more that of Bellow and Malamud: His one-page stories are mostly about old Jewish men caught in a tide of urban gentrification and architectural upheaval, vintage portraits of Lower East Side fetishization. His characters are authoritative and paranoid, narrating the strip with great knowledge about the inner workings of common objects (doorknobs, supermarkets, the way that sound travels between New York apartments), but with a severe spike of paralyzing fears — burglars, death, the chemicals found in our food.
What stops us from laughing away these characters like the most obvious Philip Roth caricatures is this strange surreality that runs beneath it all — half urban legend and half magic, these stories that seem on the one hand far-fetched but on the other are one small step away from being true. An engineer figures out how to extract electricity from the sound of New York subways, and uses it to power malted milkshake machines in corner stores throughout Brooklyn. A new luxury high-rise features natural-water baths with bottoms that extend deep into the Earth’s core, extracting the freshest water that can possibly exist.
Ben Katchor’s stories don’t feature characters so much as ideas. This way of writing could get boring awfully quickly — except that the ideas he presents are so clever and haunted, it’s hard to imagine that ever happening.
Fiction
Hand-Drying in America: And Other Stories
- Review
By
– February 19, 2013
Matthue Roth’s newest book is My First Kafka: Rodents, Runaways, and Giant Bugs, a picture book, which will be released in June 2013. His young-adult novel Losers was just made a special selection of the American Library Association. He lives in Brookyn with his family and keeps a secret diary at www.matthue.com.
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