Watch Your Mouth
By Daniel Handler
St. Martin's Press, 272 pages

I was saddened that day a few years ago when Kurt Vonnegut announced he had written his last novel. But after reading "Watch Your Mouth," I am comforted knowing that Daniel Handler is a writer who is more than ready to pick up the torch and write the kind of deftly funny absurdist story that both horrifies with its subject matter and hooks you with its humor.

"Watch Your Mouth" presents us with the Glass family -- Dr. Ben, Mimi and their children, Cynthia and Stephen -- and they're about as far from Salinger's Glasses as can be. Into their well-to-do Pittsburgh home one summer comes Joseph, Cyn's college boyfriend, who expects a season of easy work at a local day camp and bountiful sex in the bedroom he and Cyn will share. That last hope is quickly dashed, replaced by the awful realization that the Glasses seem caught in a weird circle of incest. And, as if things weren't strange enough, Mimi is spending a lot of time down in the basement, building what may be a fully functioning golem, a vengeful monster from Jewish folktales who can rise up and clean house, so to speak, in gruesome, brutal fashion.

Much of "Watch Your Mouth" is presented as an "opera in book form," a device that could be too cute in the wrong hands; here it works for a house full of events, as Joseph describes them, "that were melodramatic, heart-wrenching, and absurdly -- truly -- tragic." Joseph himself is the only character who seems afflicted by passivity, an inaction balanced by his funny, on-target narration (where, for instance, a woman wading topless into the surf is described as resembling "a Venus somebody was trying to throw back"). You don't have to believe in golems to give yourself over to this novel. But it helps if, like Handler, you believe Tolstoy was wrong, and that each family is different, whether happy or not.

-- Edward Neuert

An Obedient Father
By Akhil Sharma
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 292 pages

In the first two lines of his much-anticipated debut novel, "An Obedient Father," Akhil Sharma makes it clear that he will seek no sympathy and make no apologies for the New Delhi characters he depicts: "I needed to force money from Father Joseph, and it made me nervous. He had bribed me once before, for a building permit, soon after he became principal of Rosary School." Sharma's gritty, shocking honesty and spare prose left me spellbound but struggling, trying to understand his elaborately tormented characters, who seem hellbent toward an unimaginable fate. Will these desperate people find redemption in this degenerate capsule of India, and if so, are they worthy of it?

The narrator of the novel, a fat, loathsome and indolent widower named Ram Karan, introduces the reader to a world where relationships are built on mutual bribery and where to be "angry without power is to be ridiculous." Ram, a bribe taker for the Delhi Physical Education Department and reigning Congress Party, constantly wrestles with his own guilt and self-abhorrence -- the inescapable consequence of a life of excessive desire. His darkly comic and insatiable gluttony permeates the narrative, whether he's salivating over expensive food, leering at a naked woman nursing her baby or extorting money from schools.

Not surprisingly, Ram must protect himself and his family from political vengeance, but it is his home life that poses the biggest threat to his own survival. Twenty years ago, Ram repeatedly raped his daughter Anita and barely fought the temptation to molest Anita's daughter, Asha, his own granddaughter. When Anita discovers them together, she liberates her repressed rage, subjecting Ram to a peculiar punishment and a series of bribed confessions, the only retribution available to a poor, powerless woman in a country dominated by men.

Already, Sharma's novel has ignited some controversy; after the New Yorker published an excerpt of "An Obedient Father," outraged readers questioned Sharma's graphic passages describing incestuous rape. Many of Ram's rationalizations are monstrous; in the novel, he asks whether there is "much difference between what I did and a father who makes his children sing before guests at a party." This extraordinary book, however, unveils a world in which punishment is taken for granted while moral judgment is difficult if not impossible to come by. As Kusum, Ram's other daughter, who fled India for the United States, explains to her flippant American husband: "What's a joke there, in your world -- that's the only reality in this world."

-- Suzy Hansen

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