FICTION: SATIRE
Liebestod: Opera Buffa With Leib Goldkorn
by Leslie Epstein (W.W. Norton)
Some novelists write prose that’s as neat, uncluttered and impersonal as a hotel room. Think of a typical novel by David Baldacci or James Patterson. Not a word that’s unexpected or in excess. No sentences that demand — or even reward — being read a second time. Books that are nothing but efficient plot- and suspense-delivery systems.
Other novelists create chaotic congeries of words, rat’s nests full of lively disorder. An efficient skimming by the reader is the last thing these writers are after. Digressions, disquisitions, outrageous puns in a multitude of languages, malapropisms, chapter-long parentheses — that’s much of the point of a tradition in the Western novel that passes from Don Quixote to Tristram Shandy to Dickens to David Foster Wallace: what we might call the Garrulous Comic.
How well this type of comic novel works depends a large part upon how the reader warms up to the voice of the narrator. Here is a typical passage from Leslie Epstein’s new novel, “Liebestod: Opera Buffa With Leib Goldkorn,” in which the 104-year-old musician protagonist considers an irate deli waiter:
“Still the Dauphin looks daggers. So what if I have been sitting here since ten in the morning? So what if yon son is already descending over the glens of New Jersey, state insect the honeybee? In my homeland, and in all of Europe, is there not a long tradition of artistes who labor in cafes?”
Imagine a combination of Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man, Philip Roth’s Professor of Desire and P.D.Q. Bach, and you have some approximation of Leslie Epstein’s Leib Goldkorn, who last appeared in “Ice Fire Water” (1999). The still-randy Goldkorn, who has been a flutist, Glockenspiel player, pianist, adept on the musical glasses, cafe waiter, and self-proclaimed lover of Sonja Henie, Esther Williams and Carmen Miranda, journeys to his native Moravia to receive an award as the oldest living Holocaust survivor. There, in the course of a series of erotic adventures, he discovers that he is the illegitimate son of the great composer and conductor Gustav Mahler and comes upon the score of Mahler’s long lost opera, “Rubezahl.”
Freed from a siege and possible pogrom by Condeleezza Rice (the novel takes place during the Bush administration, and Rice is the first of many cameos by real-life characters), the singleminded but musically rusty Goldkorn returns to his New York home, determined to mount a production of the opera at the Met, with himself as conductor, and the lovely Renee Fleming in the lead.
The opera buffa climax of the novel, which takes place at the Met premiere, involves terrorists, a pet cat, a shifty rabbi, Elie Wiesel, a Trojan horse crafted from a Pegasus, most of the executive branch of the government, and the opportune appearance of a deli deliveryman.
Getting there, Epstein gives us a lengthy correspondence between Goldkorn and Fleming, generous snippets in German and English of Mahler’s libretto, thoughts on Jewish myth and history, a parody of a 12-step program, even a number of cocktail recipes.
Liebestod includes a few satirical passages about the Holocaust, which has been allowable as a subject of dark comedy since Lina Wertmuller’s film “Seven Beauties” (1975). Epstein was one of the first American novelists to write about the Holocaust. His 1979 masterwork, “King of the Jews,” told the sad and grotesque story of Chaim Rumkowski, the imperious and self-deluded puppet ruler of the Lodz ghetto.
The mythomaniacal Goldkorn, whose mind wanders free through time and who describes himself as a great musician and tireless lover of women, might be Rumkowski’s harmless comic counterpart.
Comedy can be — is meant to be — outrageous, unfair, stereotypical and in the worst possible taste. The one thing it can’t do, though, is to recycle jokes from another era. Lusty Latinas, haughty waiters, pompous opera stars, coarse Slavs, all these stock figures in Liebestod might be borrowed from a series of Marx Brothers movies, and they muddy the satirical purpose of the novel. Satire is based upon the present day, and satire of another era is really no satire at all.
There are some fascinating incidental observations in the novel about Jewish twists upon German traditions in literature, music and folklore and about savior — myths in Jewish folklore, like the story of the Golem, the clay creature who spares Prague’s Jews from a pogrom.
But as Epstein’s Goldkorn might say, in his charmingly mangled English, Liebestod is not in the top drawer, and reading it is no cake waltz.
