Reviews and Testimonials

Joseph McElroy

Framed by, I believe, a faith and haunted by some imminence or chance of a Jewish Messiah, the melee of Mark Mirsky’s multi-ethnic Boston made up out of what he knows inimitably well explodes at us in Puddingstone. Named after layers of geologic past and present. Rabelaisian in its collision of intellect and bodily function and American in its freedom of vivid population and language, its anarchy is original, tightly plotted, and alive. In fact, has there ever been such a novel about the other Boston? Particular in its neighborhoods real and in relentless motion, an ungenteel Boston that has been there a while emerges novel and surprising. The voice seems to expand, to reach into other identities contained by visions sometimes esoteric in intricacy, poignant in passion, telling a crowded tale too dangerous and disconsolate to be only comic.
 

Mirsky of Boston has an ear for longing, anger, contradiction, family, a smelting pot of confounded and ironic heritage; an eye for wild progress, flood, violence, the hands-on politics of Irish police force and Black power, and here, so convincing and droll and painful, the fugitive, all but isolated will of outlying Native America. History off balance designs this revolutionary tumult where events, Messianic or not, come almost without warning -- “blood cells, nerve endings, spinal marrow” the disturbing dynamo of this book. It unfolds its alternating structure of characters and groups, grossly, secretly, tenderly stories this swelling stage which is often a driven street map of a city Mirsky has now written a book about that will last. Stanley Elkin would have made common cause with it, I’m sure. Chesterton called Dickens “a mob”; Mirsky’s mob roams our fantasies and settles along the arc and flare of his art which is not only of words but draws richly taut between theater and thought, the dross and the angelic, fragments and their embrace at times suggesting our tipping national disorder, and somewhere also a "hidden universe” believed in as if God said, You would not seek me if you had not found me.

Cynthia Ozick

But here is joy, and its name is Puddingstone, and its miraculous-mercurial voice is Mirsky, pure dervish-dancing antic exuberant erudite Mirsky! Mirsky who can take on a Boston Irish (hooligan-kid) idiom, or burst into a lyrical force, or an acrobatic comic tumble — and suddenly out flies a great flowing, flaming, breathing, kabbalistically panting poem! Viz.: "In a night crisscrossed with falling stars, of girls, trembling in the cups of their undergarments, sitting and rising and sitting again, I heard of the captivation of the Holy One, in the guise of a female, through a flaw, a crack, a holy infinitesimal spirit that widened out from its hair's breadth at the moment of creation until it assumed the dim ensions of a flaw, an independent existence…" (Ah, what would I give to have been the author of "girls, trembling in the cups of their undergarments"! Not even shir hashirim can do better than that.)

Thank you, holy-unholy Maishe, for putting me in possession of this book-like-no-other.

Steve Stern

Winner of National Jewish Book Award, O.Henry Award, Pushcart Writer’s Choice Award

How is it you failed to place Puddingstone with a publisher?  The energy of the language alone should be enough to carry any reader--then beyond that the marvelous intelligence and imagination, the very acute ear for dialogue, the medley of voices and range of characterization, the wildly inventive episodes, plus the  breadth of learning you bring to bear on each of the narrative movements--all amounts to a great rich (pace Inger) smorgasbord of a novel.  Really, what's not to like?  There's the running rabbinic commentary that provides an allegorical context for the whole production and gives it greater depth and universality; there's your virtuosic strategy itself: the fractured narrative interspersed with Talmudic and kabbalistic glosses that give the text the atmosphere of fable, a kind of antic contemporary morality play about the coming of Messiah--an earnest theme counterpointed by the headlong pace of the narrative and the extremity of your characters' circumstances.  This seemed to me an urgent and original dynamic about which to structure a novel.  I liked that the action often imitated the sort of chaos that ought to precede apocalyptic events, and I was astonished that you could orchestrate such chaos without disorienting the reader.  I admired the risks you took, the verve and inventiveness with which you undertook them--virtues that, like I say, were in themselves enough to keep me feverishly turning pages.  There are indelible scenes: the flashbacks to Maishe's courtship of Rochelle, the hilarious odyssey of Chickatabot, last of the Ponkapoags; and I of course love your marriage of urban fantasy with traditional Jewish lore.  It's a distinguished book, Mark, and a scandal that it wasn't picked up by Knopf et al.