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[title]By Shalom Auslander. Riverhead, $27.
If you live in New York, you've met someone like Solomon Kugel—he's the guy muttering "people are the worst" as he huffs past a happy couple. Though characters like Kugel may be ubiquitous, you don't always get to hear their stories; Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy brings his misanthropic type center stage. Despite the novel's halfway-optimistic title, it meditates primarily on hopelessness. Kugel finds delight in moments like discovering a fawn that has been recently struck by a car, and as someone obsessed with the Holocaust, one of his pastimes is quizzing friends and strangers whether they'd be willing to hide him in the event of another genocide.
But let's start at the beginning: A city-weary Kugel relocates his family from Brooklyn to a farmhouse upstate. As they settle (albeit uncomfortably) into their new home, Kugel is stunned to find the Anne Frank very much alive and squatting in his attic. He was already consumed with panic about his marriage and his son, tending to a mother who is plagued by wartime memories she's too young to have, and protecting his home from the serial arsonist whose blazes edge closer and closer. Now must he contemplate kicking the icon of Jewish survival out of his attic?
In what amounts to a prolonged character sketch, Auslander's plain language becomes a conduit for a bruised sort of existential chatter. But after a point, Kugel's running monologue begins to feel indulgent. The character of Anne Frank—here portrayed as an intolerable, stumped writer desperate to outsell her famed diary—is a welcome distraction to Kugel's manic ramblings, but her appearances in the narrative are sparse. Though Hope vibrates with risky humor, the notes it reaches for never quite sound.
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