Book review: Mother For Dinner, by Shalom Auslander

This brilliant new novel from Shalom Auslander is not for the faint-hearted, although the faint-hearted might benefit from reading it, writes Stuart Kelly

Against a backdrop of economic and ecological disaster, a dysfunctional and eccentric American family set out to fulfil their emotionally difficult and late mother’s death-bed request about the ultimate destination of her mortal remains. As part of the (deliberate quotation marks) “journey,” we learn a great deal about the fractious family dynamic. But you’re not reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, but Mother For Dinner, the new work by the dizzyingly acerbic Shalom Auslander. I re-read Faulkner after reading Auslander, and it’s a far funnier, sadder and more profound novel than my younger self’s memory of it. I suppose one of the benefits of age is realising how shallow one used to be.

Auslander is a timely reminder that literature can still be daring, provocative and controversial, and I read it while gagging with both laughter and nausea. There are very few writers – perhaps Timur Vermes’s novel Look Who’s Back or Edward Albee’s play The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia? – that can make you think “I really can’t believe they just did that.” Auslander’s previous novel, Hope: A Tragedy, featured a mild-mannered Jewish protagonist who was somewhat troubled to discover his Midwest home was occupied by a sweary, venal octogenarian Anne Frank. If anything, Mother For Dinner ups the ante a very great deal indeed. I very much hope that some people are offended by it.