The word is Yiddish, and is an expression of disgust. A decent translation of it into vernacular English would be ‘yuck’. Shalom Auslander has been feeling feh about himself for pretty much as long as he has been conscious. Born into a strictly religious family, with a mother given to quoting Jeremaiah and a father whose violence and cruelty were almost literally biblical, or at least strongly evocative of the Old Testament, Auslander grew up to be the kind of Jew who, when visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, writes ‘fuck you’ on a piece of paper and shoves it in a crack. It is more traditional for the pious to write a prayer. But that is Auslander’s prayer.
That story came in his previous memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, published in 2007; parts of Feh cover the same ground but do not repeat the earlier book – not that either of them contradict the other very much. The main difference is that Feh, until its final pages, shifts the disgust from God to the author himself. The contempt has become internalised. Having been told for years by priests and parents that he is yuck, Auslander seems to come to accept the assertion at face value.
Indeed, he seems to go out of his way to corroborate it: he steals a pair of his mother’s pantyhose, just so at least the lower half of his body can look good (in doing so he appropriates another Yiddish insult: feigele, or queer).He steals a friend’s parents’ VCR and uses it to watch pornography on his bedroom black-and-white TV. In one of the more distressing passages of the book, he becomes hooked on a bogus elixir containing Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid, more commonly used as a date rape drug, in order to feel at least temporarily good about himself. When this is made illegal, he turns to a compound intended to clean video recording heads. This nearly kills him. When he’s not overdosing on this stuff, he self-medicates with gin, pot and cigarettes. It is only late in the book that we discover he suffers from IBS. No wonder, you think, and also: rarely does the physical ailment so closely map the spiritual one.
Somehow along the way he has managed to find not only a (by his own, plausible account) beautiful, optimistic wife, who loves him, but also two happy children, called Paix and Lux, whose names encapsulate the opposite of the two things most afflicting their father. Auslander is very much taken by the plague of darkness visited upon the Egyptians. As for himself, he is suffering from something worse than darkness:
I am 50 years old now and still I am blind. It is a strange blindness. It is not a darkness, not a blackness, not an absence of light. Rather, I go through life as if beneath a shroud; I can see the sky, the earth, the trees, the animals, all the flora and fauna without deviation, without distortion or diversion. But mankind appears to me grotesque, vile, foul, ignominious, none more so than myself. With others I can occasionally be fair. With others there is a chance of expiation. With myself, though, I am a hanging judge. To myself I show no mercy. There is no criticism I don’t believe, no compliment I accept.
Told for years by priests and parents that he is yuck, Auslander comes to accept the assertion at face value
He is amazed that his wife, Orli, puts up with him, let alone loves him. At one point, in a hotel room, trying to save their marriage, she repeats the assertion. ‘We’ll deal with your issues later,’ he replies. I do rather marvel at Orli, who seems to be something of a saint. You might even think that only sainthood – the kind actually conferred by virtue of piety and miraculous works – can account for her loyalty; but I think it is important to bear in mind that Auslander goes out of his way to make himself look like a schmuck. (A word that, curiously, only crops up three times here: twice in passing, as childhood insults, and once about God – specifically, the God who says ‘Let there be light’. The word feh, on the other hand, occurs, if my computer is working properly, 684 times, so a little under twice per page. That sounds about right.)
The self-loathing is relentless, but the strangest thing about the book is that it is not actually painful to read. For a start, Auslander is funny. The humour is mordant and, at times, savage, but it is definitely there. ‘You seem down,’ says his therapist at one point. ‘I’m in a psychiatrist’s office,’ he replies. ‘I’m supposed to be down.’ He compares the shame of going to the ‘How to Write a Novel’ section in a bookshop with buying pornography, which is both true and hilarious. Discovering reading, he asks a bookshop assistant what is funny, and is given Kafka. (Kafka is very much a touchstone, and is indeed Auslander’s deepest influence as a storyteller. The other influence is Beckett. All the rest is Auslander’s own extremely distinctive voice.)
His run-ins and experiences with various Hollywood mavens and executives with increasingly bizarre and misanthropic pitches for films and TV series are also a rich source of grim laughter. Less funny are his anecdotes about his burgeoning friendship with the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, for we know how that ends – with the actor’s death from an overdose. They had become friends because they were both feh: feh speaks to feh, as Auslander says. (It suddenly occurred to me that I have met Auslander a couple of times, and we seemed to get on rather well. I wonder if either of us should be alarmed.)
As the book progresses, examples of humanity’s grossness pile up, and you have to say that at times Auslander has a point. He moves to Los Angeles, and witnesses the following scene in a coffee shop:
A woman at the counter was berating the weary barista. ‘This is supposed to be a caramel macchiato,’ she tutted… This is what her sweatshirt said: Spiritual Gangsta.
Auslander has a particular refined contempt for people who wear clothing with slogans on them. But then, you may ask yourself, what does he not have a particular refined contempt for? Actually by the end of the book you do learn that it is human kindness.
I will not say what the epiphany is that causes the darkness to lift from his soul, but by the time it happens you will be most relieved, not only for his sake but your own. As I say, it is a surprisingly undepressing book, but at times you wonder how far he can take it. Anyway, I gather that he and Orli are still together, and I know I might be spoiling the ending a bit, but the news makes me happy.
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