His oeuvre is deliberately unsettling and funny, if inconsistent — “Hope” is brilliant, “Mother” a dismal misfire. In his new memoir, “Feh,” Auslander is wondering where all of it has gotten him. One answer: a hospital stay. Lifelong body-image issues have drawn him to carcinogenic, organ-corroding supplements, “banned” labels be damned. “Banned just means it works,” he insists. “Banned is good. It doesn’t get better than banned.” He’s being sarcastic but not entirely — the whole memoir is driven by the question of whether the official story is one worth adhering to.
Most of the time in “Feh,” he’s dwelling on the most official story of all. Putting his shul training to good use, he revisits the Torah and finds that “feh” — Yiddish for “disapproval or disgust” — is God’s prevailing sentiment toward his creation. God named the first man Adam, “from the Hebrew word Adamah, which means dirt. He named his son Dirt.” The book of Job, he notes, “is the beloved tale of a man learning to despise himself. This is what God says when he does: ‘Good.’” Auslander takes it personally: Every calamity he faces becomes a plot point in “God’s favorite comedy.”
But rather than simply riffing on the feh-ness of it all, “Feh” has a plot: Auslander’s attempt to escape the clutches of “feh,” which means rethinking what he knows not just about his story, but all stories. As a middle-aged parent, the stakes are higher: He has two children to raise, a wife to care for, a (failing) career to maintain, and he’s witnessed what self-loathing has done to himself and others.
The self-deprecating humor is playful when he’s talking about himself: “Like geese heading south for the winter seeking warmth, Fehs head to vitamin shops for the summer seeking self-esteem.” But the mood is more somber when feh claims a friend, in this case Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman who died of a heroin overdose in 2014. Shortly before he died, Hoffman had signed on to star in a sitcom that Auslander had written, later made as “Happyish.” In Hoffman, Auslander sees a needless victim of self-directed anger and fear, and the injustice makes Auslander overheat, infuriated at “a single story, forever changeable but never changing, a single story told by humans, to humans, that dehumanizes us all.”
The single story of feh, he concludes, is in its way just as damaging as heroin or sketchy supplements — a gateway drug in itself. And because the story is all-pervasive, Auslander has plenty to satirize. Advertising’s key concept is that “the more feh you can make someone feel, the more inclined they will be to purchase the product that promises to unfeh them.” The Bible? “Feh.” “Atlas Shrugged?” “Feh II.” (Ayn Rand is a Swiss Army knife of feh-ness — wounded, bitter, selfish, pitiless.) Capitalism is built on cruel feh fables like “The Man Who Was Lazy” and “The Man Who Deserved It.” Zillow makes you fantasize about inaccessible dream homes; Nextdoor tells you that every street, everywhere, contains a horror.
So if the problem is story, Auslander concludes, we need some new ones, stories that invert our received notions of heroism and failure. “What if mankind is the hero, and God is the bad guy? What if it’s God who is feh?” That’s not a new concept — religion is often criticized as a way to restrict and humiliate. But Auslander’s particular counternarrative is that the abuse is all-pervasive, invading secular life as well. His literary heroes — Kafka, Cervantes, Voltaire — all thrived when they pushed against convention, where “the desire to be heard overwhelms the desire to be loved, where the voice whispering Speak! becomes louder than the one shouting Feh.”
Exploring this idea doesn’t, strictly speaking, require an extended commentary about Auslander’s adolescent fascination with the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, or for Borscht Belt-ish riffs on the old men in L.A. coffee shops constantly mishearing one another. A cynic in the world never runs out of material, and Auslander doesn’t always hone or organize it well. But the persistent blackness of the book’s black comedy makes the tiny shafts of light in the latter chapters shine that much brighter. None dare call it a redemption narrative — that’s feh-talk — but Auslander does find a place where he doesn’t have to be overwhelmed with contempt for himself or others.
“Mankind is the only creature that hates itself,” Auslander writes. And: “Mankind is the only creature that tells itself stories.” The two are intertwined. Even if we work to fix our predicament — expunge ourselves of pointless shame, stop courting needless self-harm — it’s unlikely we’ll ever stop entirely hating ourselves. But we can try, as Auslander does for much of “Feh,” to write a story that’s still honest, without feeding into the hate.
Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and the author of “The New Midwest.”
