Comedic strike-out

Janet Maslin reviews ‘To Rise Again at a Decent Hour’ by Joshua Ferris, a humorous tale of a dentist, and calls it an eminently worthy nominee for the Booker Prize... 

When Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour arrived in May, there was no reason to suspect it would make history. But Ferris, along with Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves), is one of the first two Americans with novels to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014. (This is the first year in which writers from the United States have been eligible.) Happily for Ferris, it is also the year he far surpassed his first two books.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour also hits a high-water mark in the literature of dentistry, however limited that may be. Its main character, Dr Paul O’Rourke, artfully introduces himself as a great many things in the novel’s opening pages. He is a New York dentist, misanthrope, Red Sox fan, strikeout with women and de facto atheist with a craving for oral sex behind grocery stores.

“It is most easily done in New Jersey, where it happens to be legal,” he confides. This sounds like a tiny homage to Philip Roth, who is certainly one of the book’s sources of inspiration. Paul may not be Jewish, but you’d never know it from his obsessions — Judaism being one of them.

Ferris ushers Paul into the book on a caustic wave of cruelty that’s as damaging to the dentist as it is to his patients. “A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be,” Paul tells the reader. “That he’s also half-mortician is the secret he keeps to himself.” Ergo, every mouth into which he looks is already half-dead, and every patient in his Park Avenue practice is sharing the secret of his or her mortality just by letting Paul see it. Ferris has said that he chose dentistry as his protagonist’s profession because he wanted to write a book about a man who needs to save himself from despair (or words to that effect) and is exposed to it all day long. Along the way, the author manages to make oral decay both terrifying and gut-bustingly funny.

As the book begins, Paul meets a strange, frantic patient who declares out of nowhere: “I’m an Ulm, and so are you!” Having no idea what an Ulm is, the dentist dismisses this nut out of hand. But the idea that he has some secret heritage makes the tightly wound Paul start unraveling. It’s not long until he has lost his bearings so badly that he asks a dental patient for a stool sample. He gets seriously agitated in front of another patient about not being able to remember which character was which on Friends. He absently waves instruments in patients’ faces while doing such things, which is a very bad way for a dentist to come unstrung.

His undoing is partly technological, mostly religious. The tech meltdown begins as a form of identity theft that may or may not have been caused by the Ulm in the office. Soon after the Ulm visit — and a section of the book related to this patient is wittily titled Ersatz Israel, a play on Eretz Israel, the broadest biblical term for that land — an ersatz Dr Paul O’Rourke begins appearing online, first as a Red Sox enthusiast, then as a spouter of religious dogma.

Ferris has invented a series of theological passages on which the Ulms, living in Israel and descended from the ancient Amalekites, have based their beliefs, and the fake Paul is now out proselytising for them. The real dentist has no choice but to examine whether his own faith exists and what his beliefs are.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour turns Paul’s history with religion into a riotous comedy of errors. A lot of it has to do with his short, unhappy history with girls and women, to whom he has attached himself with near-religious fanaticism that scared them. “Me, I never do anything romantically that doesn’t involve blood, fever and the potential for incarceration,” he says, and goes on to tell a series of stories that bear that out.

The main ones have to do with a Roman Catholic girlfriend, Samantha Santacroce, whose family saw him as a stalker — and upped his status to that of Satan once he acknowledged his atheism at the family dinner table. And with Connie, his current office assistant, who let him imagine himself as an honorary Plotz. That is to say, part of Connie’s large, Jewish family.

Though Paul has no legitimate connection to the Plotzes, he falls in love with the whole crew. He describes himself as “a happy whore at the Plotz dinner table,” even if nobody at those meals particularly returned his affection. Indeed, Connie’s Uncle Stuart was deeply suspicious of Paul at first, telling him an unfunny joke about the difference between a Philo-Semite and an anti-Semite: The point of the joke is that there’s only one of the two that a Jew can trust. Paul is as dense about this as he is about everything else — until his obsession with the Ulms brings him, Uncle Stuart and a crew of hastily introduced secondary characters into investigating how the Ulms’ roots fit among the Israelites’ ancient enemies. In this branch of history, the Hebrews’ destruction of the Amalekites still lingers.

In the present, these hostilities have bitter resonance. In this novel, they remain as part of what originated as a detective story and much longer book, Ferris told The Paris Review; he began writing it years ago, then put it aside for a while. The drastic cuts and inevitable confusion still create bumps in To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, since this was never a book that had any easy narrative or philosophical destination. But its wit is so sharp, its fake-biblical texts (“from the Cantaveticles, cantonments 25-29”) so clever and its reach so big that the messiness doesn’t do significant damage. It’s an eminently worthy nominee for the Booker Prize or any other.

This is also the first novel by Ferris that really lives up to the reputation he established too quickly. It’s a major achievement that far outshines the much-publicised Then We Came to the End, his entertaining but weightless debut, and The Unnamed, a baffling, downbeat aberration. Neither of those books anticipated the wonders that turn up in this one.