Book Review: Golem Song by Marc Estrin - Page 2

Further complications testing Alan's people-person skills crop up during a night when a senseless city-wide gang war turns the ER into a “stitch-em-up factory,” and a garrulous Farrakhan-inflamed Anti-Semite GOMER (“Get Out of My Emergency Room” regular) pokes and prods Alan to the point where contention is construed as racism - but only on Alan's part. Ultimately and however arguably justified, Alan’s better judgments and attempts at poetic but un-PC justice — the denigration of affirmative action in confrontaion with his African-American supervisor doesn‘t help — leads to the loss of his job. 

A latent fanaticism fanned also signals the advent of a new and unstable phase, tinged with tension and dark humor, that comes as Alan deludes himself into believing he’s been “chosen” to deliver America from Anti-Semitism. Indeed, as one character says, he’s become enslaved “to your own rhetoric, to the flight of your ideas.”

If Alan has become a Frankenstein of sorts, it’s all the more a Faustian connection rooted in the folktale of the Golem, the animated being of clay that defended the Jews in 16th Century Prague. It’s a theme that pops-up repeatedly in Estrin’s ever-arresting novel; Alan remembers reading as a child about this “cross between the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy.” His mother used to call him a golem, too (perhaps just a twisted term of oedipal endearment, though).   

But now, as Alan prepares for a retaliatory plan of cultural attack, it is more befitting to remember that in Hebrew, the word golem equates to “shapeless matter.” “Something,” Alan is told, “that has potential but is not yet formed, not yet there.”

Nothing ratchets up the riveting anticipation and the anything-can-happen possibilities more than putting them under the command — or utter lack of control — of a man who is himself still an unfinished works-in-progress.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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