Jennifer Gilmore works too hard. When she isn't trying to channel Phillip Roth by redefining the Jewish-American novel, she's reinventing the American Dream, and though she paints it in the auriferous tones of her first novel's title, make no mistake: the glow is pure surface.

Golden Country seems to channel a number of older literary standards. The first is The Great Gatsby, a look into the underbelly of the American dream, which Gilmore filters through novel number two—something like Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, a meditation on Jewish sexual identity. The relationships in her novel are haunted by either Pride and Prejudice or a romance novel by Danielle Steel, tempestuous and relentlessly socio-economic.

Unfortunately, Gilmore leaves the seams all too apparent as she weaves together such unlike styles and narratives, leaving instead a loosely-cobbled patchwork. Though the narrative voice soars to harmonious beauty, the reader is left after these passages aching all the more to hear such lyricism consistently throughout the novel. I was more troubled, however, by her treatment of the Jewish-American Dream. In exposing the darkness of social and material ambition, she paints the same cultural stains in thick swaths on everyone in all three generations she discusses, making her characters smack of stereotype or the ironic repetitions of history.

Golden Country concerns itself almost exclusively with the romantic and financial vicissitudes of posh East Coast Jewish immigrant families. Lineage and social status figure prominently into the marriages she chronicles, old concerns made literary, made immortal, by the likes of Pride and Prejudice. Before Gilmore pens a single word, we get a premonition that, unlike Austen, this author might sacrifice depth for breadth in her embrace of a cultural milieu— Golden Country opens with a diagram of interlocking family trees of the three clans she constructs, as enormous and incomprehensible looking as some unwieldy game of Tetris. Gilmore treats each of these families equally, offering minor glimpses into a larger ensemble cast of characters rather than painting an in-depth portrait of any of the relationships in question. If her interest as a writer were so preoccupied with the historical and social context of her setting, or else the cultural clash of immigrants in a homogenizing society, or the music of narrative language, this lack of psychological depth might pass without a murmur. But her story is so people-driven—or, more rightly, person- driven—that their flatness disappoints. The novel is like a disappointing dinner party where we don't have the time to get to know the fascinating people present.

The fabric of all these affairs, which are woven and cut in narrative hiccups of time from the 1920s to the 60s, fray and dissolve in the reader's mind once each episodic chapter ends. If you do read this novel, make a photocopy of this genealogy before you begin. You'll need it to follow Gilmore's story.

The first chapter leads the reader to believe that the ensuing book will examine the marriage of David Bloom and Miriam Brodsky. Instead, Golden Country spans three families—Bloom, Brodsky, and Verdonik—who pass in and out of each other's lives, presenting few variations on Jewish stereotypes, like a völkisch masquerade, too often related through cultural jargon and Jewish "inside jokes."

In the account of Sarah and Seymour Bloom's honeymoon, for example, Sarah's identifying characteristic in both the narrator's and Seymour 's mind is always her red-lipstick beauty, the angelic way her dress falls over her curves. Not until the morning after his wedding night does he realize he has married someone far more monstrous:

"What is it, my love?" Seymour reached out to touch her hair.

Sarah sighed. "Am I really to spend my life with a man who actually goes door to door selling things?"

Seymour rolled away from her, stunned. She hadn't seemed to mind his occupation last night when, high as a kite on champagne, she tore off her wedding dress with abandon and got down on her knees. "Come here, Sy," she'd said, winking, and he'd moved to the edge of the bed and watched her mouth, free from the red lipstick he had never seen her lips without, move toward him, smiling.

This passage, and a visit to a West Egg mansion stylized after an Egyptian tomb, approximates the vision of the American Dream propagated by Golden Country: a façade of conspicuous monetary wealth behind which lies insecurity and seamy sex.

Consumption status figures prominently in such post-marital hangovers, which happen with unsettling frequency. Sarah's horror that she has "married down" is typical of other female characters in Golden Country. Just as these women are defined almost exclusively by their physique, each man's respective worth is defined by the size of his wallet and extent of his reputation.

Occasionally, Gilmore dabbles in more offensive Jewish stereotypes. After Esther Brodsky gives birth to her first daughter, she is stunned at the size of a certain facial feature: "'Her nose!' Esther whispered, as if it were an unspeakable disease. 'Look at her nose. I knew it,' she screamed. 'I knew I should never have married you!'" Such an outburst can either be interpreted as anti-Semitism or anxiety at the conspicuousness of one's Jewish heritage in 1930s America. I'm inclined to believe the latter, but because Gilmore doesn't explain and leaves characters' motivations as nebulous as their historical context, she walks a fine line: we are not sure the narrowness is hers or her characters', as when the narrator notes, "Although she was an intellectual girl—always with that long nose in the Shakespeare, the Chaucer—Seymour knew it was Sarah's body that reached for him that day."

Beautiful Jewish girls swim in plentiful schools in the ocean of Golden Country, with nary a gentile maid to cloud the water. The pronounced nose and the svelte figure seem to go hand-in-hand in a desirable Jewish girl, a public reminder of one's heritage to please the parents and a sexy trophy to please the man-friends (and the man himself). And once an eligible (read: well-off) bachelor meets a fair maiden, the chupah, glass, and rabbi appear almost instantly. There is no dating or childhood in Gilmore's Jewish New York, just birth, marriage, kids, unhappiness, spinsterhood, death. In their unquestioning procession through maturity and adulthood, they create another urban Jewish archetype practically opposite of that neurotically brooding Jewish archetype, Woody Allen.

The flatness of characterization gives way, finally, to the "real people" of the baby boomer generation, though even these characters seem less than fully formed. Toward the end of the novel, at a funeral that ushers out some of the stink of the crassly materialistic old generation, Miriam tells her mother that she is pregnant, to which her mother responds, "That's wonderful, Miri... It's too bad your father will never know. But I will say this: it's about time. We were all beginning to wonder." Gilmore's eye for the hypocrisies of Jewish ambition is keen, but the characters she has created are too numerous to earn our attention and too unscrupulous to earn our sympathy. Channeling the specificity and empathy of a more Fitzgeraldian social satire might help Gilmore's next novel seem less farblondzhet, less lost in this faux-gold Country.

 

Kyle McAuley is a Literature concentrator in Leverett House. His own Jewish mother is not a stereotype.