Contemporary America at one remove

Moving Kings

Fitzcarraldo Editions. £12.99 Reviewed by David Herman

JOSHUA COHEN was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He was recently named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. He is prolific, writing novels, short stories and articles for a number of leading American publications.

His new novel, Moving Kings, is about an American removal business. Imagine a high-octane American version of The Chain, without Jack Rosenthal’s charm or his superb ear for dialogue.

The central character in Cohen’s story is David King, a big, energetic Jew who runs King’s Moving, a removal firm. His marriage has failed because of his affair with Ruth, his doting office manager. He’d “dumped his wife, he’d gotten hair implants and replaced his teeth.”

We first meet King, way out of his depth at a super-rich political fundraiser. He calls for his car to be brought round. “What kind car? Bentley or Rolls?” “You know what kind,” King says. “A van, carbon. A Plymouth Estupido.” That’s King. An east coast Jewish van man with hair implants. If James Gandolfini was still alive, he’d play King in the movie.

Cohen is at his best writing about King and his removals guys. He has a good eye for class, all the details that identify the rich, the super-rich and, way down the league table, David King and his men. At the fundraiser, he’s working hard mixing with the very rich, pretending he isn’t sweating, “and agreeing, ‘yes

Joshua Cohen: an eye for detail hasn’t the Meadow Lane heliport gotten so crowded lately?’”

Into King’s world comes his cousin, Yoav, just out of two years in the Israeli army. King’s father Yudy came from Poland to America. King’s uncle, a camp survivor, had gone to Israel instead and Yoav is from that branch of the family and is traumatised from his time in the army. David finds him a job in the removals business. Yoav is joined by a fellow veteran, Uri, and the two “Raelis” see the seedy side of New York’s five boroughs. At times, the writing fizzes along. There’s a wonderful 10-page sequence about the removal business, bursting with the life of contemporary America, with telling details of class, race and sex. This is not Bellow’s Chicago or Roth’s New Jersey. Cohen’s world is full of the new immigrants: Arabs, Israelis, a removal man called “Serbian Phil” and another called “Felony Fredo Castro” — low-lives who swear, drink, take drugs.

Cohen moves skilfully between the US and Israel, middle-class suburban life (King’s clients) and the rough world of the removal men.

The problem is that when King is out of the picture, the other characters lack charm, or even interest. Cohen is clever but less good at creating characters who will live with you for years or creating stories that move or delight you.

At one point, a character consumes “lamb tajine, gulped down with lukewarm Schweppes.” It’s a nice detail. The book is full of them. But a gripping plot would be good, too.

David Herman is the JC’s chief fiction reviewer