Word: friedman
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Stern, by Bruce Jay Friedman. This touching, low-key novel about being Jewish in a lawn-proud U.S. suburb artfully blends fact with fantasy, rue with mirth...
STERN (191 pp.) - Bruce Jay Friedman -Simon & Schuster...
...panel shows, there are books that glow and grow with a life of their own, "discovered" and talked up by readers rather than literary promoters. Currently sparking such a small-scale chain reaction is a strange and touching little first novel called Stern. It is giving Author Bruce Jay Friedman, 32, who has published some short stories and who works in Manhattan as editor of an adventure magazine, a coterie reputation as a new novelist with an antic imagination and a style to match...
...develops an ulcer, ''a hairy, coarse-tufted little animal within him that squawked for nourishment," and is sent to a nightmarish rest home populated by a brilliant set of grotesques that might be right out of Hieronymus Bosch. Stern emerges to have a nervous breakdown, which Author Friedman manages to make both hugely comic and horrendously real...
...novel's only important lapse is its denouement-the fight with the kike man, which is written as if Friedman were trying to compose an allegory. When the man clobbers him on the ear, Stern "thrills with joy at still being alive," then feels "a warm shudder of sympathy for the man, who had been unable to knock him unconscious with the blow." He walks bloodily home, purged at first, then puzzled to find that the old fear of his enemy down the road is beginning all over again...