By Preston Gralla

In Feh, Shalom Auslander confronts being middle-aged, a time of life that, given his external circumstances, you would think he would be celebrating. But, instead of kvelling, he’s sunk, hilariously, in the depths of despair.

Feh: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander. Riverhead Books. Hardcover, 368 pp, $29

Take one part Jonathan Swift, one part Philip Roth, one part Henny Youngman, add enough self-loathing to last several lifetimes, and you’ll get a sense of what reading Feh: A Memoir is like. One moment you’re laughing, the next you’re crying and the next you feel as if you need to take a shower to remove all the oily shmutz (Yiddish for dirt) on you, even if you just toweled off a few minutes ago.

Feh, for those unfamiliar with the most onomatopoetic of languages, Yiddish, means exactly what it sounds like, an expression of disgust, repugnance, and scorn. In Shalom Auslander’s hands in this book, it’s all that, plus plenty of humor, sometimes blacker than the darkest of nights, other times so weird and antic that it’s like Henny Youngman on mescaline throwing out one-liners.

It’s safe to say that nowhere else will you find so much delight and humor in a middle-aged man lying on a hospital bed hooked up to IV tubes and surrounded by wailing medical equipment trying to convince his psychiatrist that his drinking a bottle of a liquid labeled Danger, Toxic, Not Fit for Human Consumption was not a suicide attempt or a call for help. And that’s in just the first 11 pages of a 368-page book. There’s much more where that came from.

Feh is a follow-up to Auslander’s equally funny and bitter Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir about growing up in an ultra-Orthodox community in Monsey New York, about 25 miles north of New York City. (Monsey is part of the small town of Spring Valley, where I grew up, although I was brought up a reformed Jew, not ultra-Orthodox.) In that book, he describes having to contend not just with the insular restrictive ultra-Orthodox culture and community, but also with an always-angry sometimes-violent father who beat him whenever the man guzzled Manischewitz sweeter-than-sugar kosher wine.

In Feh, Auslander confronts being middle-aged, a time of life that his external circumstances would make you think he would be celebrating. Foreskin’s Lament had gotten rave reviews, and his novels and short stories were critically well-received. His novel Hope: A Tragedy was hailed as “the funniest novel of the decade” in 2020 by The Times in the U.K. He also had a successful Hollywood career, notably writing the Showtimes series Happyish. He was married to a woman who loves him. They had two children. The man should have been kvelling rather than being sunk into the depths of despair.

But Auslander was so damaged by his childhood that when middle age hits, none of that matters. He binges on alcohol and drugs as well as far weirder and more dangerous stuff like video-head cleaner. He tries to thread the needle between finding artistic fulfillment and selling out so he can afford a big house with an infinity pool. At one point, he becomes an ad executive, which didn’t go according to plan, although Auslander, as with everything else in this book, milks it for maximum comic effect. He had suggested to Duracell that they launch an ad campaign focused on two batteries that tried but failed to commit suicide. He writes: “Duracell didn’t like the suicide angle. I assured them it was a growing market.”

Finally, at the age of 50, he hits his lowest point. He realizes he’s lived a total of 18,000 days. He writes:

Eighteen thousand days of this interminable trial…condemning, blaming, finger-pointing, hating, judging all around me. Eighteen thousand days of a trial called to order in my earliest youth, before I could read, before I could write, before I could possibly understand that the judge was a madman, the jury bloodthirsty, the verdict sealed before the case began.

But eventually he manages to find meaning in his life. And he finds it as so many countless others have, in a simple way through his spouse and children, in his case following a Thanksgiving together. Not that he closes his eyes to the darkness or makes this a cheap-and-easy redemption story of discovering the goodness that dwells in us all. He knows exactly who he is, what he believes, and where he comes from, writing: “I am no cheerleader for humanity. I am a descendant of the Holocausted and the Inquisitioned, the enslaved and the pogromed. I am no stranger of man’s humanity to man.”

But he also finds out that, despite his childhood, he’s no stranger how families can heal one as well. He concludes: “The trouble with midlife, of course, is the damned thing is half over. This life I wanted to end when I was younger, I now want to last forever.”

Preston Gralla has won a Massachusetts Arts Council Fiction Fellowship and had his short stories published in a number of literary magazines, including Michigan Quarterly Review and Pangyrus. His journalism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, USA Today, and Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, among others, and he’s published nearly 50 books of nonfiction which have been translated into 20 languages.