The Château

Having lost his job as a reporter at the Washington Post, William ("Bill") Melsorovich sets off for Florida to investigate the suspicious death of his college roommate Zbignew Stanislaw Wronski, a plastic surgeon known locally as the Butt God of Miami. Bill will renew his troubled relationship with his father, Melsor, who's challenging the condo board at Château Sedan Neuve, a high-rise overlooking the sea with a contentious bunch of residents, many Russian Jews. The Katzenelenbogens emigrated from the USSR when Bill was young, which explains why numerous sentences and paragraphs are written in Russian (always translated) but not, curiously and inexplicably, why some appear in the Cyrillic alphabet and others in the Latin. This book has the same sharp writing and madcap air of Goldberg's award-winning debut, The Yid, but it is a less assured work plagued by overwriting, as if the author's aim were to convince us of his undeniably impressive talent.