The Last of the Light

A 20-something Jewish man awaits the end of the world in the reflective if repetitive latest from Joseph (Our Mother, the Mountain). Like everyone else in the world, the unnamed narrator has recently received an alert on his phone about an imminent apocalyptic fire. He remembers how his mother, a professor of Jewish studies, used to tell him about the legend of the Tzadikim Nistarim, which says that each generation in human history includes a group of 36 people tasked with justifying all of existence to God. Stirred to become one of the righteous, the narrator begins keeping a journal to account for his and his family’s lives. He writes about his parents’ differences—his construction worker father, embodying various blue-collar clichés, tells his mother, “We’re gonna miss that brain of yours”—and about his Yiddish-speaking grandfather’s journey to Ellis Island. He also listens repeatedly to morose Townes Van Zandt songs and pines for his girlfriend, who left him to be with her parents after learning of the fire. The narrator’s soul-searching is occasionally moving, especially as he begins to wonder whether there’s actually a God, but Joseph’s tendency to repeat scenes and thoughts in the narrator’s third-person journal that were already covered in first-person makes much of the novel feel redundant. Despite a dramatic premise, this fails to take flight. (Mar.)