The Ruined House

In Namdar’s disappointing debut, Andrew Cohen, an NYU professor and formerly prolific writer, has a long, slow, incredibly banal mid-life crisis. Stretched out over the year leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, Cohen wallows in self-pity, ambling toward a breakdown that reads more like a man grasping at his waning privilege than a human being fearful in the face of mortality. Although Cohen left his ex-wife and daughters decades ago, when the girls were little, only now does he realize how absent they are from his life. Vulnerable for perhaps the first time, he’s haunted by his abandonment of them and yet can’t seem to bring himself to take responsibility. Otherwise, Cohen goes on to suffer from dwindling sexual mojo, writer’s block, and nightmares. He feels suffocated by his beautiful, decades-younger girlfriend (a former student) and doesn’t understand why he isn’t awarded a promotion he’d been expecting. Perhaps because of the unrelenting internal narration, the book remains plotless. Cohen falls asleep, has anxiety attacks, stays awake, rushes into taxis, eats or forgets to eat, and finds himself bewildered by his own dysfunction. In prose as tedious as Cohen’s misery, Namdar tries to underscore the significance of his narrator’s collapse by cataloguing every hour of every day. But Cohen remains the jerk he’s always been, and the reader is left wishing he would see what they do—that his self-absorption only intensifies, rather than dissipates, against the forthcoming tragedy of actual human suffering looming on the horizon.[em] (Nov.) [/em]