Goyhood by Reuven Fenton surprises with its unique take on some favourite story types such as the road trip and the male midlife crisis. But more than that, it is a story of faith, grief, self-discovery and a venture into a dark side of forgotten America.

At the age of twelve years old, Marty Belkin had what could only be described as a profound religious awakening. Having never experienced an ounce of religious instruction from his single mother, Ida Mae, Marty is floored one lazy hot day in his small Georgia hometown when he encounters the establishment of the town’s first synagogue, meets Rabbi Yossi Kugel and is told by Ida that they are in fact Jewish.

Marty was more than miffed that his mother had waited until now to drop this bombshell – as an aside, no less. But the dominant feeling was exaltation. A Jew! Marty Belkin. A member. He’d never been a member of anything,

From that day, Marty, now Mayer, was set on a new course. With Yossi’s encouragement, a thirteen-year-old Mayer finds himself in a yeshiva in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which had a special program for secular Jewish kids. A precocious, even obsessive student, Mayer is soon after enrolled at Ohr Lev, one the most prestigious yeshivas in the country. At twenty-two he was called into the office of the rosh yeshiva, the legendary Rav Yaakov Drezner, who asks if he would like to meet his daughter.

Mayer has now been married to Sarah for eighteen years. The terms of his marrying into one of America’s most prestigious Jewish families is that he must be a full-time student for life, never train for the Rabbinate or apply for a faculty position at Ohr Lev. In return, as well as marrying Sarah, they will be supported financially. Mayer could hardly have dreamed of a more perfect life for himself than to spend his days studying the myriad nuances of Jewish theology without having to worry about material everyday concerns.

Mayer’s past re-enters his life unexpectedly one day with a phone call from his estranged fraternal twin brother, David. Mayer has kept little contact with his brother since he left Georgia and they have not spoken for eight years. What Mayer knows of David’s life since they parted ways is that it became one of partying, drug use, one-night-stands and get-rich-quick schemes. Talking to each other after a long time and very divergent paths is awkward but necessary. David’s news is that their mother has died after what appears to have been a suicide.

When he thought about his childhood, it wasn’t to confront trauma but to suss out the pertinence of that time in the first place. God put him on one path, only to divert him to another. What had been the point of the first path?

Like her twin sons, Ida Mae’s path also took a turn after that fateful day the Rabbi came to town. She became the Rabbi’s secretary but otherwise she continued the lifestyle of alcoholism, drug use and poor nutrition the boys were familiar with from their childhood. Her poor choice in lovers became less of an issue as her lifestyle began to catch up with her as she aged and succumbed to obesity.

The news has burst the bubble of Mayer’s secluded life. He has not left his neighbourhood for four years and must now enter a world which he has become a stranger to. Of airports, baggage claims, cell phones and social media. There is a eulogy to compose, a funeral to attend, a mourning period to observe, not to mention a reunification with his brother.

Like being transported to a parallel world, Mayer in Georgia is confronted by the hauntingly familiar and disturbingly new. Just as when he first met Rabbi Yossi Kugel, meeting him again changes Mayer’s life. The Rabbi tells the brothers that their mother mailed him a letter intended to be read after she died. In it she confesses that she is not Jewish and consequently, neither are David or Mayer.

Mayer draped an arm over his eyes. He lay quiet for a moment. Then, from deep in his chest came an Edvard Munch scream that made the two men recoil. He caught his breath and screamed again. Then came a succession of softer cries resembling those of an animal whose leg had been caught in a steel-jaw trap for hours. He writhed and blubbered, choked and spluttered, a display of emotion so primitive that David and Yossi couldn’t help but stare in morbid fascination.

A devastated Mayer immediately feels that his life is over. His marriage is certainly over. But David and the Rabbi begin plotting a course to save the situation. A discrete conversion needs to be arranged but might take a week. What is Mayer to do for a week as a non-Jew? For David the answer is simple; a road trip.

Goyhood is a debut novel by Reuven Fenton, a journalist for the New York Post. It will be released on May 28 2024 and has already received impressive blurbs including from Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus.

From a brief description of the novel, you might experience the enthusiasm to experience it that I had. The basic premise nicely mixes novelty with the familiar to encourage you to feel like you are about to experience something new yet with a confidence that you are going to enjoy it. Goyhood is a comedy in the classical sense of the term – a cosy relationship between perception and reality suffers a sharp sudden estrangement and the reader wonders how things might ever be reconciled. Entertainment by humour is not really the objective in Goyhood though there are definitely moments of that, one in particular I found especially funny.

The sense of the comfortably familiar arises from that particularly American archetype; the road trip. Some examples of this trope are alluded to in the novel. One of my favourite iterations, which was not mentioned but which I felt resonated with Goyhood, is the 1988 Barry Levinson film Rainman. There too we have two estranged brothers reunited by the death of a parent, their lives diverted by the revelation of the parent’s secret. Two brothers whose lives have taken very different paths and are very different people. Mayer, though not on the spectrum, nevertheless has been living a cloistered life and has tendencies towards being obsessive. Both brothers will potentially have their lives changed by the experience of their reunion on the road.

Goyhood’s easy readability and obvious appeals do not obscure its other elements. The brother’s journey into parts unknown and their encounters with the people who inhabit it draw the reader into another side of America, past and present. From their own feelings of nostalgia, the lives of those they meet who put their own into perspective, the vast overlooked American nowhere and the monsters who may lurk there; Goyhood has a dark side as well.

They passed abandoned barns and rusting silos that resembled copper obelisks in the dying light. They passed peanut fields and soybean fields and orchards of apples, nectarines, peaches and plums. They passed roadside fruit stands – shuttered for the night, or forever – with clapboard signs for watermelons, rock melons, honeydews, crenshaws, blackberries, due berries, strawberries and sweet corn.

A novel like this must overcome a few challenges though. The most important for me was to avoid cliché and to not seem too contrived. David clearly has a motive for his road trip suggestion; an intention to spark something in Mayer that will bring back the twin brother he knew in childhood. Mayer is not blind to his brother’s machinations and is stubbornly avoiding succumbing to them. Fenton avoids cliché by not allowing either the reader’s expectations or the character’s plans to come to pass.

The second challenge of avoiding artifice is more difficult. I will admit that I began to wonder if Fenton was stretching my credulity too far at times. It is tempting to digress here into a discussion about statistical probability and point out that many of the amazing coincidences we have all experienced in life are actually not that improbable. So, just as we should not give too much credit to these occurrences in life, we should also not fault fiction for indulging in them either.

Instead, I think it is best remembering that this is not just a story of a predicament with much potential for humour, this is also a story about grief and faith. Mayer shares the reader’s scepticism. According to his religious beliefs, the fact that he was wrong about being Jewish means he is also wrong about his relationship with God. How he might interpret the events that unfold are also altered. But in the end, Fenton succeeds here too. Enough so to draw affection for the story’s meaning even from this atheist reviewer.

Goyhood is a short novel. It ended leaving me wanting more. David and Mayer’s lives have taken an unexpected turn. Their reconciliation is to journey into a past that cannot be reclaimed, a present that cannot be anticipated and a future that has been postponed if not entirely diverted. Life is like that. Neither the reader nor the characters know what will happen next.

Disclosure – Author Reuven Fenton provided me with an advanced copy of Goyhood in exchange for an independent review. It’s release date is May 28 2024 and you can find it here on Amazon.