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Dec. 23, 2005
Bridget Jones, with bagels
Authors enter mainstream press with romance and mystery novels.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
It had to happen. With niche markets for just about every community
under the sun, major publishers have wised up to the idea that maybe
there should be Jewish characters in mainstream fiction.
Two new releases – Wendy Wax's Hostile Makeover (Bantam,
$9.99) and Rochelle Krich's Now You See Me... – cater
to this market.
Hostile Makeover may be the first "Jewish chick lit"
title. It's also the first time Wax has featured Jewish characters
in her work.
"It was time to plan my older son's bar mitzvah," Wax
explained in a release, "and I decided I didn't want to take
my Jewishness for granted anymore, even in my novels."
Sure enough, the Atlanta author plonks bar mitzvah planning smack
into the middle of her third romantic comedy, which stars the inimitable
Schwartz family: an overbearing mother, retiring father and daughters
Shelley ("daddy's girl") and Judy (the "happily married"
wife and mother).
We learn that Judy's first son had a Roman gladiator theme for his
bar mitzvah, which, since it featured "a lion in a cage right
next to the gift table," makes her the envy of b'nai mitzvah
mothers everywhere. But to the dismay of bar mitzvah planner Mandy
Mifkin, Judy's not so sure she wants to continue down this path
with son number two – or, for that matter with her life as
is. The glamor of the working world seems much more appealing than
being a stay-at-home mom.
Meanwhile, younger sister Shelley stumbles repeatedly in her attempts
to prove that she can thrive in the family advertising business
- a business which, after her father falls ill, is taken over by
her nemesis/fantasy man (she can't quite decide which) Ross Morgan.
Ross, like Shelley's boyfriend Trey Davenport and her shiksa best
friend Nina Olson, has very blue eyes. Descriptions of blue eyes,
therefore, appear in various guises every few pages of the novel:
Nina "looked up out of blue eyes that were not joking one little
bit," Shelley tries "to lose herself in the blue of [Trey's]
eyes" and as for Ross Morgan's Armani jacket, our heroine observes
that "the bold color brought out the blue of his eyes, and
the cut of the jacket empasized his broad shoulders. He was a manly
man, all right...." (Shelley's therapist, Howard Mellnick,
of course, has "intelligent brown eyes.")
Together, Ross and Shelley do battle over minor ad accounts –
companies with names like Tire World and Falafel Shack – and
engage in more than a little flirting. One assumes that the interplay
between them is supposed to conjure thoughts of a Katharine Hepburn/Spencer
Tracy comedy, but old Kate and Spence had much better scriptwriters.
Hostile Makeover is rife with princessy stereotypes –
obsessive shoe-shopping among them – but it's pacy enough for
a quick and frivolous holiday read. And after all, family ties win
out in the end. Shelley ultimately decides she can no longer date
Trey Davenport after he faints at a bris.
"It wasn't just that he wasn't Jewish," she observes,
"it was his complete and utter WASPness, that white-bread lack
of ethnicity that she seemed to be drawn to over and over again,
but which she could never quite picture herself eating for the rest
of her life."
Now You See Me... carries a little more weight - even if
it, too, has seemingly stereotyped characters. The fourth in Rochelle
Krich's Molly Blume detective series, it features Los Angeles crime
reporter Molly, her new husband, Rabbi Zack Abrams, and an Orthodox
family whose daughter, Hadassah, has run off with a man she met
on the Internet. It's Molly's job to try and find out what happened
to Hadassah.
What's intriguing about Krich's work is the way it melds the classic
mystery format with everyday Orthodox life. All of her married female
characters wear wigs; all of the men wear kippot as a matter of
course. And yet Molly, in particular, is feisty and independent,
spending half her time on book tours and the other half pursuing
bad guys. For this, Krich has garnered a warm reception from major
newspapers and well-known mystery writers like Sue Grafton, as well
as from both Jewish and non-Jewish readers.
Krich – who is Orthodox herself – noted in an interview
that "readers say my books help them understand their Jewish
neighbors. Others, that my books have awakened nostalgia for their
own religion." She also pointed out that having Orthodox characters
in her work means she faces "the Shabbat challenge – moving
plot along when my characters retreat from the secular world for
25 hours." She said she decided to write the character of Hadassah,
"a rabbi's daughter, to emphasize that no child is invulnerable
to the dangers of an increasingly complex world."
Despite some occasionally clunky prose (and the fact that, here
too, characters are identified by their eye color), Krich is adept
at maintaining a taut sense of plot and giving a sense of normalcy
to Orthodox observance.
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