That much of writing is not writing, or rewriting, or outright trashing what one has written, is a well-worn truth of the trade, fascinating maybe only to practitioners. But Shalom Auslander is a truth teller whose punim you want to pinch — at which point he’d worry that you found him fat.
Auslander’s second memoir, “Feh,” is a dark, daffy chronicle of failure and disappointment — this though his first, “Foreskin’s Lament,” was well-received and followed by novels, short stories and work in Hollywood, notably on the Showtime series “Happyish.”
Still, he suffers — as many successful people do. “Success is a drug,” as Lil Uzi Vert wrote, whose effects wear off fast.
“Feh” is a 356-page explication of a particular pessimistic worldview with which Auslander has been cursed since first grade in an Orthodox yeshiva in Monsey, N.Y., though because of his prose style — lots of one-liners and crisp dialogue set off in dashes — it seems far shorter. The title is a Yiddish expression of disgust or despair that here (like “preppy” before it) is sometimes promoted to a noun, a resting state or even a type of person.
The antic upbringing Auslander described in “Foreskin’s Lament” now yields more anecdotes, like the time he tried on his mother’s pantyhose, unrolling them like the Torah, after concluding that Victoria’s Secret was that “women were beautiful. And I was hideous.”
“Feh” goes further into the disillusionments of adulthood, which for our troubled hero has included near-death experiences like falling asleep on a four-lane highway while driving a three-ton pickup truck, high on video-head cleaner.
“The upside to midlife, of course,” Auslander writes (and the downside, he’ll soon learn), “is that the damned thing is half over.”
Auslander’s self-deprecating, Jewish and libidinous humor has often been compared, including in The New York Times, to that of Woody Allen and Philip Roth. Throughout “Feh” he reminded me also of Oscar Levant: the doleful, virtuosic pianist and public wit whose addiction and mental-health struggles were showcased in a 2023 play. (For a treat, search up his own three out-of-printish books, titled “A Smattering of Ignorance,” “The Unimportance of Being Oscar” and “The Memoirs of an Amnesiac.”)
Like Levant, Auslander uses his wife, Orli, and children, two young sons named Lux and Paix, for material. (“They seem to love me, though I cannot fathom why,” he writes. “I can only assume they’re idiots.”)
And he too struggles with substances: gin and pot but weirder, scarier stuff as well. Early on in “Feh,” he lands in the hospital after taking a banned fat-loss drug acquired on the internet; later pages depict an alarming reliance on RenewTrient, a cousin to liquid Ecstasy whose removal from the market prompts the plunge into video-head cleaner.
“Whatever unregulated chemicals and foul concoctions we can force down our throats that might have even the slightest chance of making the reflection in our mirror something we can like, or at least abhor slightly less,” he explains of his kind.
The author identifies many in the Feh-lowship, none so keenly as the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom he comes to know as Phil. Hoffman bonded with Auslander over several business meetings and originally starred in “Happyish” (at the time with a different working title), then died of a drug overdose after filming the pilot. (Another actor took the role and the series proved short-lived.) It’s what Alanis Morissette would call “ironic,” but worse.
Auslander also praises and then loses his shrink, Ike, after a podcast, “The Shrink Next Door,” about his long-term manipulation of a patient, leads to his license being revoked. Fiercely loyal despite the damning real-life details of the case, Auslander imagines Paul Rudd, who played Ike in an Apple TV+ series based on the podcast — and who, though Jewish, seems the carefree, unfeh antithesis of the Catholic Hoffman– — tortured slowly to death by Bengalese tigers.
A fan of Beckett, Kafka and Gogol (and a guilty consumer of how-to writing books), Auslander also convenes a canon of grim likemindeds: Jonathan Swift, Ayn Rand, Arthur Schopenhauer. Like DeLillo and Rushdie he has worked in that great graduate school of American letters: advertising, coming up with terms like “follicalization” for a shampoo company and less successfully a suicide angle for Duracell.
He longs for artistic integrity, but also money, the most potent thing, he suggests, a psychiatrist could prescribe. How about. a “house with a name” and an infinity pool (though pool parties, for a person with a body-image problem, are actual hell)? He suffers relatably from “Zillowcholia” and imagines a paradise called Penthousia, inspired by the pornographic magazines he found hidden by his father, where shame doesn’t exist — later identified, at least until he realizes the homeless problem, as Los Angeles.
Auslander grasps one of the first rules of comedy: the callback or internal allusion. He has enough good ones that the banal ones — “stories are powerful things” — land with a duller thud.
Nonetheless, he commits — another rule of comedy — and lovers of this tradition will submit. “Feh” inverts the old tagline “never let them see you sweat”; it is all sweat on display, salty and messy, the exposed shirt stains of someone determined to be a bronze medalist even at the insecurity Olympics.
The post Don’t Worry, Be Happy? ‘Feh’ on That. appeared first on New York Times.