Part epic, part bildungsroman, Peter Orner’s “Love and Shame and Love” is a refreshing departure from the shtetl nostalgia shtick that has come to typify contemporary American Jewish fiction. Orner’s characters are complex, but their quirks, like their Jewishness, are the stuff of real life. And like life, this novel is at times terrifically funny; at others, hopelessly sad. Always, the writing is meticulously crafted and evocative, as in this lush morning-after description of the protagonist, Alexander Popper, and a woman he briefly courts: “The drab light woke them up, tangled and alone, the cement floor, the lake quiet, the gulls hawking and circling.” Orner is particularly adept at rendering difficult emotions so that they resonate viscerally without feeling overwrought. Consider this passage, in which Alexander considers the apartment into which he and his brother have just moved along with their newly separated mother, seven blocks away from the family home: “The new place smelled of plastic…. It was mercifully quiet. His father’s raging hurts a few blocks away; they heard only an echo.”
Echoes reverberate everywhere in this novel — in the silences around the words and in the actions that repeat themselves from father to son and back. Alexander, third-generation Chicagoan, second-generation American-born, is the novel’s nominal hero, though the story is only as much his as it is his grandfather Seymour’s and his father Philip’s.
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