‘The Château’ Sun and skulduggery in South Florida
Imagine being saddled with a name like William M. Katzenelenbogen. What might such an unfortunate soul be like? Put-upon, definitely. Canny and shrewd, conceivably.
Even shifty, perhaps. One doesn’t go through life answering to such a tonguetripper without making the absolute most out of it.
It might also reasonably describe someone with a keen nose for the truth, justice even, and for sticking it in precisely the wrong places to no small comic effect — someone just like the reluctant hero of Paul Goldberg’s second novel, “The Château.”
Bill is a divorced District of Columbia resident in his early 50s who, as the novel opens, has been dismissed from his job as a decorated science reporter for the Washington Post. In HR-speak, the reason for his firing is “insubordination.” In reality, he fell asleep in a county-government board meeting; the resulting footage was a big hit on that evening’s late local news.
Now, about the only thing Bill has to show for his decades of serving the public interest is an old broomstick given to him as an award for the zeal with which he once enjoyed, in familynewspaper terms, sticking it to the man. As he ponders checking out permanently, a former colleague suggests the suspicious death of a prominent plastic surgeon known as the “Butt God of Miami Beach” is as ripe a book idea as he’s ever likely to find. Realizing the Butt God is Bill’s former college roommate seals the deal.
But no sooner has he begun to look into the death of his friend, who plummeted from a high-rise somewhere within the HollywoodFort Lauderdale skyline, than his estranged father conscripts him to help save another such building. This one is a rapidly deteriorating condominium known as the Château Sedan Nueve.
The old man, whom Bill hasn’t seen in 12 years, is a real piece of work. Once a prominent Russian-literature professor and Soviet refusenik, Melsor Katzenelenbogen — aka Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the October Revolution — headed south after being indicted (but not prosecuted) for Medicaid fraud in New York. “The Château” joins his story as he attempts to overthrow his condo’s mendacious board of directors. Quite the poet himself, Melsor is especially adept at the piquant form of propaganda known as paskvil:
Set in the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, “The Château” is a novel about corruption, both of the soul and the more tangible sort of ill-gotten gains. (ISIS here is not the Islamic State but the offshore construction contractor controlling Sedan Nueve’s money spigot; Melsor’s epithetic gift rivals even our new commander in chief ’s.) Every so often Goldberg winks at his readers to remind them he endorses neither his characters’ actions nor their works’ artistic merit, but it must be said that Melsor’s paskvils and chastushkis, their musical counterpart, are pretty hilarious all the same.
Melsor, and many of his elderly immigrant neighbors, are as enthusiastic about Trump’s ascending to the presidency as Bill is appalled. The elder Katzenelenbogen (it means “cat’s elbow”) even keeps two copies of “The Art of the Deal” on hand, one of them in Russian. He’s totally bought into the man he phonetically calls “Donal’d Tramp” — not only is outrageous bragging the best way to catch an opponent off guard, Melsor believes, but deal-making is both useful for getting ahead and necessary for survival. Blue counties may have been shocked to see such an uncouth character reach the Oval Office, but it seems South Floridians saw it coming for a while.
It’s almost a shame that the Russian-born Goldberg, whose 2016 debut novel “The Yid” zooms in on a zany Jewish theater troupe during Stalin’s final days, didn’t hold off until Robert Mueller entered the picture. Or is it? Even pre-inauguration, Bill is fond of inserting himself into Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General when he’s not dreaming of running the Existentialist Detectives agency as “Inspector Luftmensch.”
Goldberg, for his part, is in no great hurry to round up his unusual suspects. Like one of the gaudy paintings in Melsor’s 18th-floor condo, “The Château” has extraneous detail to spare in the form of BASE jumping, Soviet-era folk singers, obscure Russian poets, Jewish mysticism and modernist architecture and design, for starters. If readers appreciate Warren Plattner, Morris Lapidus, Thayer Coggin, et al., as much as Bill does, they’ll love “The Château” that much more.
Alternately cringing and chuckling at his own characters, Goldberg knows all too well that comedy is just tragedy plus time. Almost in spite of himself (and almost surely to spite his old man), Bill is less of a Luftmensch than a true mensch, someone who ultimately, if begrudgingly, does the right thing — no matter how much of the bargain-basement vodka known as Kozachok it takes to get there.
Imbibing heavily certainly helps him navigate the sunsplashed dystopia of “The Château,” where Remorse is more effective as a brand name than an emotion and ethics are situational, if present at all. As Bill summarizes recent events at Château Sedan Nueve to Gwen, a onetime co-worker and possible love interest, she observes that the only people who operate with that sort of reckless impunity are the cartels — and Putin. Bill shrugs. “Here in Florida, every man is a cartel unto himself.”
On the board of our condo We’ve elected ISISes They have wrecked our Château And got their Lexuses