Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on September 26, 2014

The Golem Does Hollywood in Outlandish Tale

Joan Allen

Like Father, Like Golem: Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman set their fanciful new thriller in Hollywood.

The Golem of Hollywood By Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman Putnam Adult, 560 pages, $27.95

Jonathan and Jesse Kellermans father-and-son opus, The Golem of Hollywood, is as ambitious as it is completely ridiculous and thats not altogether a bad thing. The novels protagonist captures some of the storys scale and confusion: Jacob Lev is a hard-drinking, twice-divorced Harvard-dropout-turned-hardboiled-Los-Angeles-cop (got all that?) whos already thoroughly washed up at the tender age of 31. But unlike most world-weary cops before him, Lev also happens to be a lapsed Orthodox Jew, the son of a Talmud scholar father and depressive artist mother. Its his religious heritage, admittedly rare among cops, that gets him recruited to a special branch of the LAPD on the same morning that he wakes up with a mysterious and, obviously, totally hot woman.

Soon after this dream woman vanishes, Jacob is summoned to the scene of a grisly murder, in an abandoned house in an off-the-grid part of the Hollywood Hills. There, Jacob discovers some vomit and a decapitated head that glistened surreally, like a gag item fished from the ninety-nine-cent bin at a novelty shop. Theres no body in sight, and the crime scene is otherwise immaculate, but for the Hebrew word for justice, tzedek, burned on the wall.

From this premise the father-and-son writing team spin a tale spanning many millennia and several countries and countless leaps of plausibility. If the story starts out unassuming enough for this genre, with the usual details about the crime and the spiked-coffee-swilling detectives character, the authors suddenly lunge far, far back in time, all the way to Cain and Abel, where we meet the forgotten sister of the first family. (Its impossible to miss this transition, by the way, because someone in production went all out and fake-aged the pages to resemble biblical parchment.)

Cain and Abels sister Asham, we learn, is matchlessly beautiful, and the source of great rivalry between the brothers its the desire to win her, the authors imply, thats the real motive for the first murder in history. As the cold-hearted but compelling Cain implores his sister shortly before bludgeoning Abel:

We could build a whole world together, he says.

The world already exists.

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Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman Tell a Whopper With Everything in It

Category: Talmud
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