The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 16 September 2014
by Joshua Ferris
Our presence on the Internet has become a major part of who we are. Our on-line identity, one that we'd like to project of ourselves, permits us to interact in cyberspace, to know each other's on-line identities, to shop and to express opinions of all stripes. Now, imagine you don't have much of an on-line presence, or that you've carefully protected your real identity. What recourse do you have if someone else should appropriate your real persona and then use it to express opinions and ideas that you don't share, opinions that might hurt or offend your friends and loved-ones? Someone else has your Facebook page, your Twitter feed, your domain name. It is a 21st-century version of a Kafka-esque nightmare.
Our protagonist, Dr. Paul C. O'Rourke, DDS, finds himself in just this situation. One day he discovers that someone is posing as him on the Internet, and is using the identity to put forth a possibly fictional history of a possibly fictional ethnic identity, one that suggests O'Rourke might be anti-Semitic. What is the good dentist to do? What ensues is a novel about identity, how it is defined by our communities, and how O'Rourke is drawn by the way communities suffer collective indignities through history. In his case, he is drawn alternately to the Catholics, the Jews, and to Boston Red Sox fans. Indeed, when the Red Sox start becoming a World Series winning team, he feels his collective identity threatened. But O'Rourke is a lonely man. He was an only child of a bipolar father who committed suicide. For the rest of his life, O'Rourke is drawn to strong family and cultural ties. He finds these through the families of his girlfriends, driven more to impress the parents than the women themselves. He is desperate for connection. So, when he begins to see what his Internet impostor is up to, he is slowly drawn in to the possibility that he might be a member of a long lost and long-oppressed tribe of Israel. On the other hand, if O'Rourke had elisted the help of one of those Internet identity scrubbing services, none of this novel would have happened.
Ferris gives us a somewhat uneven story, one in which the reader may grow impatient with Dr. O'Rourke's self-absorption, his unease with the characters around him, his dental office staff, and the people drawing him into the myth of the Ulm. He is nervous and anxious that people see him in a particular way. He dreads that they may think he is an anti-Semite, and they begin to think he protests too much. There is an uncomfortable undercurrent to O'Rourke's life. At the same time, Ferris rather movingly portrays the yearning many of us have for a greater connection. Atheists yearn for the ritual, habit and familial intimacy of religious community. Baseball fans find comfort in their mutual suffering. Everyone in the world dreads major dental work. Ferris gives O'Rourke a solution, one subtly obvious. He writes like a combination of Nicholson Baker, with his meticulous detail, and Kurt Vonnegut, with his famous longing for community. Indeed, Vonnegut, also the son of a suicide, yearned for a world in which everyone could find family, anywhere. Lonesome no more!
(This book was short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.)