A memoir of the author's attempt to escape the biblical story he'd been raised on and his struggle to construct a new story for himself and his family.
A cynic in the world never runs out of material, and Auslander doesn’t always hone or organize it well. But the persistent blackness of the book’s black comedy makes the tiny shafts of light in the latter chapters shine that much brighter.
A dark, daffy chronicle of failure and disappointment ... Auslander grasps one of the first rules of comedy: the callback or internal allusion. He has enough good ones that the banal ones... land with a duller thud. Nonetheless, he commits — another rule of comedy — and lovers of this tradition will submit.
