Word: sterne
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...STERN (191 pp.) - Bruce Jay Friedman -Simon & Schuster...
...authors assail the ear on 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...
...Stern is about being Jewish in a lawn-proud suburb of midcentury, middle-class America. But Stern is no sociological novel. Blurring fact and fantasy, it is funny and sad at the same time in the tradition of the Jewish schlemiel story and the Charlie Chaplin movie...
Dogs & Caterpillars. Stern is a tall, round-shouldered man with fat hands and "pale, spreading hips" whose job is to write descriptive literature on labels. His wife is large-eyed, long-nosed and sexy, his lonely eight-year-old son spends most of his time sucking on a blanket. Stern moves them to the suburbs, buys a house for $23,000, and at once begins to suffer the consequences...
...Stern's unfamiliar, spread-out country world seems full of traps and tortures. Night after night, as he makes his way home through a neighboring cluster of houses, two huge dogs vault a fence and savagely escort him, his wrist held wetly in the lead dog's teeth. Caterpillars munch away half of every shrub and tree on the place. "This house has been standing here for thirty years with whole shrubs," Stern moans. "We're in it a month and there are halves...