Contemporary Authors

• The Comedown ( novel) Holt (New York, NY), 2018

1. The comedown : a novel https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035218 Frumkin, Rebekah, author. The comedown : a novel / Rebekah Frumkin. First edition. New York, New York : Henry Holt and Company, [2018] pages ; cm PS3606.R88 C66 2018 ISBN: 9781250127525 (hardcover)

• Rebekah Frumkin - http://www.rfrumkin.com/about-rebekah-frumkin.html

  About rebekah

  Rebekah Frumkin is a writer based in Chicago. She also teaches writing and literature at Northeastern Illinois University and University of Illinois-Chicago.

  Her fiction, nonfiction, and journalism have appeared or are forthcoming in Granta, Pacific Standard, McSweeney’s, Catapult, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. Her debut novel, The Comedown, will be published by Henry Holt in April 2018.

  She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSJ from the Medill School of Journalism. She is the recipient of the Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Grant and the Meta Rosenberg Fellowship for her fiction.

  She has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa and currently teaches creative writing at Open Books in Chicago. She also works as a freelance reporter for the Social Justice News Nexus and In These Times.

  She speaks and studies German, for which she received a Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, as well as Spanish and intermediate-level Hindi, for which she received a Critical Languages Scholarship.

  It goes without saying that she’s a queer person.

• Granta - https://granta.com/contributor/rebekah-frumkin/

  Rebekah Frumkin
  Rebekah Frumkin holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSJ from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She was the 2014 recipient of the Richard E. Guthrie Fellowship. Her debut novel, The Comedown, is forthcoming from Henry Holt in April 2018. She lives and teaches in Chicago and can be contacted at rfrumkin.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @jeansvaljeans.

Quoted in Sidelights: “A stronger novel would more efficiently connect its many threads (or dispense with a few), but from page to page, character to character, this is a powerful debut.”

Frumkin, Rebekah: THE COMEDOWN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Frumkin, Rebekah THE COMEDOWN Henry Holt (Adult Fiction) $27.00 4, 17 ISBN: 978-1-250-12752-5
The death of a drug-addicted patriarch, and the stockpile of cash he's rumored to have left behind, has a broad impact across multiple families.
Frumkin's ambitious, sensitive, and busy first novel centers on Leland Bloom-Mittwoch, who in 1999 flung himself from the roof of a Tampa hotel. He lived rough: He had a cocaine habit he routinely rationalized (he called it his "medicine") and a family he often neglected. He also possessed a briefcase full of money that was previously in the hands of a drug dealer. Cue a hunt among family, friends, and enemies to locate it. But the luggage is a MacGuffin: The novel is less a mystery than a set of character studies that make up a cross-section of contemporary America, white and black, rich and poor, cis and trans. Individually, they're remarkable portraits: Leland's second wife, Diedre, nearly 20 years his junior, is an engrossing Florida street punk; Maria, his youngest son's estranged girlfriend, was a child prodigy who at 15 was determined to "prove conclusively that the external world exists"; Natasha, who sacrificed a strict upbringing to take up with a drug dealer, is a tragic but indomitable figure. Intelligence is a common thread among the characters, which benefits Frumkin rhetorically--it frees her to riff on pharmaceuticals, music, Wittgenstein, Judaica, and fine art. But also thematically: She's contemplating how much (or how little) brains have to do with our survival when many social forces are seemingly determined to undermine it. So the novel's flaws are of the sort that afflict only writers who are swinging for the fences: complex plotting, research spilling off the pages like sap from a tree. A stronger novel would more efficiently connect its many threads (or dispense with a few), but from page to page, character to character, this is a powerful debut.
Frumkin has talent to burn, and this very good novel suggests the potential for a truly great one.
1 of 6 5/29/18, 11:57 PM
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Frumkin, Rebekah: THE COMEDOWN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248254/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0137f748. Accessed 30 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248254
2 of 6 5/29/18, 11:57 PM

Quoted in Sidelights: “messy, meandering and occasionally illuminating.”
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THE COMEDOWN
Trisha Ping
BookPage.
(May 2018): p24. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE COMEDOWN
By Rebekah Frumkin
Holt $27, 336 pages ISBN 9781250127525 Audio, eBook available
Fractured family dynamics and the search for a missing fortune are the main threads of this textured debut, set mostly in Cleveland, Ohio, over the course of three decades.
The Comedown centers on the families of two men: Leland Bloom-Mittwoch and his drug dealer, Reggie Marshall. Reggie sees Leland as an unstable client; Leland, however, considers Reggie his best friend. Leland is present the day Reggie is shot, and he flees the scene, distraught, with a briefcase full of money. Over the ensuing years, Leland struggles with addiction and mental illness, wrecks his first marriage, enters into a second and has a damaging affair, while Reggie's wife, who was once a promising student, is left to raise their two boys in poverty, alone. Through several tantalizing plot twists, the lives of the Bloom-Mittwoch and Marshall clans remain intertwined in a network of simmering tension, blame and guilt.
First-time author Rebekah Frumkin, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is generous with her characters and their frailties. Each point of view (and there are many) feels distinct; often, the same events are shown through the eyes of different characters, adding dimension. Although some readers might find it disorienting to be launched into another point of view just when they've settled into the current one, the novel's nonlinear, fragmented structure reflects its themes of disconnection and the uneasy mental states of most of the characters.
Messy, meandering and occasionally illuminating, The Comedown is a family saga that recalls real life.
3 of 6 5/29/18, 11:57 PM

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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ping, Trisha. "THE COMEDOWN." BookPage, May 2018, p. 24. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537055057/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=48ee46ea. Accessed 30 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537055057
4 of 6 5/29/18, 11:57 PM

Quoted in Sidelights: “sprawl comes at the cost of its focus,” “knack for creating lifelike, original characters and letting them do the talking.”
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The Comedown
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
114.14 (Mar. 15, 2018): p16. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Comedown.
By Rebekah Frumkin.
Apr. 2018. 336p. Holt, $27 (9781250127525).
The best way to approach Frumkin's ambitious debut, which follows multiple generations and offshoots of two Cleveland-based families, is to not get too bogged down in its complicated and mysterious plot. (And to frequently consult the two family trees that precede it.) The story opens in 1999, with Leland Bloom-Mittwich Sr. jumping from a Miami hotel roof, before cutting back to the awful night in 1973 when he and Reggie Marshall, the drug dealer he considers his friend, get horribly caught up in Reggie's boss' "liquidation" plan. In chapters that jump back and forth in time and adopt the perspectives of Leland Sr., Reggie, and their children, lovers, and children's lovers, Frumkin's powerfully drawn moments present themes of race, religion, and education; addiction and mental illness; sex, love, and inheritance. And if her novel's sprawl comes at the cost of its focus, Frumkin displays a real knack for creating lifelike, original characters and letting them do the talking. Readers who enjoy getting quite literally lost in interconnected stories and drilled-down character studies will happily buckle up for the ride.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "The Comedown." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 16. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094408/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=dbd972c8. Accessed 30 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533094408
5 of 6 5/29/18, 11:57 PM

Quoted in Sidelights: “fans of puzzling, epic family sagas will enjoy the layered narrative, but the roundabout path may put off some readers,”
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The Comedown
Publishers Weekly.
265.7 (Feb. 12, 2018): p54. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Comedown
Rebekah Frumkin. Holt, $27 (336p) ISBN 9781-250-12752-5
Frumkin's sweeping debut charts the complex, broken dynamics of two very different families across two generations. Heroin addict Leland Bloom-Mittwoch witnesses the shooting of his dealer, Reggie Marshall, in 1973. Deeply shaken, he takes off with a briefcase full of cash. Following Leland's and Reggie's families for the next 30 years, from Ohio to Florida and back, the novel slowly reveals a network of connections and secrets among the two clans as they blame others for their hardships. Reggie's wife raises her twin sons alone in poverty, having given up her promising academic pursuits to marry the charming but shiftless Reggie. Leland abandons his wife and the son he feels unworthy of being his namesake to start a new life in Florida. Both generations stumble through affairs, suicide attempts, economic hardships, and chemical dependence, leaving a sense of deep unease haunting every life. Frumkin structures the novel by giving each character a chapter to recount their formative years and the same crucial events. The result is a messily realistic narrative with many loose ends and too much detail about minor players, yet with a powerful sense of personal blind spots and self-delusions. Fans of puzzling, epic family sagas will enjoy the layered narrative, but the roundabout path may put off some readers. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Comedown." Publishers Weekly, 12 Feb. 2018, p. 54. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528615472/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=a1cbb065. Accessed 30 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528615472
6 of 6 5/29/18, 11:57 PM

"Frumkin, Rebekah: THE COMEDOWN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248254/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=0137f748. Accessed 30 May 2018. Ping, Trisha. "THE COMEDOWN." BookPage, May 2018, p. 24. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537055057/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=48ee46ea. Accessed 30 May 2018. Bostrom, Annie. "The Comedown." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 16. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094408/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=dbd972c8. Accessed 30 May 2018. "The Comedown." Publishers Weekly, 12 Feb. 2018, p. 54. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528615472/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a1cbb065. Accessed 30 May 2018.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/family-matters-on-rebekah-frumkins-the-comedown/
  Word count: 2240

  Quoted in Sidelights: “matter-of-fact approach to writing about the complicated web of reasons why people’s lives turn out the way they do,” and that “is essential to The Comedown’s success.”

  “Frumkin’s technique of replaying scenes from multiple perspectives effectively gives readers a 360-degree view of how something happened,” Babendir related. “Most importantly, however, it is useful for exploring the totality of how her characters’ actions affect those around them, and how each character lives with it.” He further explained: “The contrast born out of The Comedown’s structure also makes room for Frumkin to explore her characters’ wide-ranging sociopolitical circumstances.”

  Family Matters: On Rebekah Frumkin’s “The Comedown”

  By Bradley Babendir

  MAY 8, 2018

  LELAND BLOOM-MITTWOCH SR., cocaine in his blood and the Torah in his hands, ends his life by jumping off the roof of a Hyatt in Tampa, Florida. It’s 1999. In the moments before he leaps, he believes he sees a hand descend from the sky and call to him. It tells him he is worthy. He asks the hand if Reggie Marshall, the man he believes to be his best friend, who he believes died at the hands of a fellow drug dealer in 1973, was also worthy. The hand says yes, and he jumps. It is a prayerful moment, one that affirms Leland Sr.’s belief that he is doing the right thing. It is also tragic, like all death, but Leland Sr. seems to be at peace. Or, at least, as at peace as someone high on cocaine before noon can be.

  It’s a striking beginning, made more so by its place outside of time. Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown is not told linearly, but through a string of chapters from the perspectives of interconnected characters from two families, the Bloom-Mittwochs and the Marshalls. A pair of family trees at the beginning of the book represents the two lineages, and each of the 14 chapters comes from someone connected to the aforementioned patriarchs, often either scorned or abandoned by them or by one of their offspring. The chapters cover huge chunks of time, from the respective characters’ births to the book’s fictional present, around 2009.

  The trees and the nonlinear nature of the book create ample opportunities for dramatic irony, of which Frumkin, in her debut novel, makes wonderful use. When Leland Sr. is reflecting at the hotel in Tampa, he considers the risks involved with building relationships with other people:

  He thought how there was no way to know how long loving someone could last, or whether it was even a good investment to begin with. That’s what kept people watching all those television soap operas. That’s what kept people praying in shul. They wanted to know how the other people and things they loved would turn out — whether they’d be destroyed by them or loved back.

  Throughout his life, Leland Sr. did his fair share of loving and destroying, though it’s not always clear whether he sees it that way. He cheats on and then leaves his first wife and child in 1983, and then leaves his second wife a widow and his child fatherless in 1999 when he commits suicide. The woman with whom he cheats is Reggie’s estranged wife, Natasha Marshall. Their affair ends abruptly the day one of her 13-year-old sons catches them together. Even so, those he loved tended to love him back, at least for a time. Mental illness and drug addiction linked reciprocated love and eventual destruction: for Leland, the two could never be mutually exclusive. Despite the fundamental sentiment of Leland’s reflection, there seems to be little uncertainty about the inevitably tragic end to his most beloved relationships.

  The exception to this rule is not a fortunate one. Reggie, who Leland Sr. frequently calls his best friend, found him to be a reprehensible character. Outside of their narrow interaction of drug dealer and drug consumer, Reggie wanted nothing to do with him. He was, as Reggie said, a “stupid ass […] the kind of stupid that couldn’t take a hint.” At times, he considered killing him:

  He hated him but hurting him would feel like kicking a stray dog. He had a philosophy that the kind of person who deserved to be on the receiving end of a barrel was also the kind of person who’d been on the firing end, and Leland Sr. had never been on the firing end.

  This comes first as a depressing surprise. When Leland Sr. describes their relationship, readers trust him implicitly. Every additional mention that undermines it as the book goes forward is a punch to the gut. While Leland Sr. leaves his wives and children, and ultimately humanity altogether, in his heart, he always remains true to Reggie.

  This type of dissonance is the biggest return Frumkin draws out of her roving perspectives. Rarely do characters in The Comedown believe themselves to be or in the wrong, but they often are. This is clearest in a pivotal scene that takes place after Leland Sr.’s funeral. Leland Jr. confronts Diedre, his father’s second wife, and demands that she let him go to her home and take back the possessions his father took when he left, which he believes are rightfully his. Diedre, having just lost her husband, is not in a position to fight back: “She agreed to it because he wore an expensive suit and threatened to sue her if she didn’t comply.” She feels alone and scared, because Leland Jr. is trying to make her feel alone and scared. When Leland Jr. reflects on it in his chapter, though, he refers to it as “legal business” and sees his actions as justified. Importantly, his recollections erase the hostile tone that made the interaction especially horrifying the first time around. Parts of the interaction are run back again in Leland Jr.’s wife’s chapter. She sees her husband fall “into aggressive lockstep with Diedre” before he announces that he’ll be following her to her home. Her telling has compassion for her husband and recognizes how this stems from his anger at his father for abandoning him, but she can’t help but be a little horrified by Leland Jr.’s behavior. Nine years later, Diedre’s son Lee Jr. is still haunted by the memory. The event has deeply scarred him. On his 18th birthday, he drunkenly sends an email to Leland Jr. demanding the return of his family’s possessions. His mom is a manager at OfficeMax and they’re scraping by on her hourly wage while Leland Jr., much wealthier, has no real need for the valuables he took. Unsurprisingly, this is unsuccessful.

  Frumkin’s technique of replaying scenes from multiple perspectives effectively gives readers a 360-degree view of how something happened. Most importantly, however, it is useful for exploring the totality of how her characters’ actions affect those around them, and how each character lives with it. The scope of The Comedown is such that everyone is in close proximity to a tragedy at all times. Frumkin’s juxtaposition makes it clear that what these characters do to one another in the book is both awful and perfectly human.

  ¤

  The contrast born out of The Comedown’s structure also makes room for Frumkin to explore her characters’ wide-ranging sociopolitical circumstances. The differences are generational, racial, cultural, and economic, and she writes clearly on how their existence and collisions shape the lives of her characters. Aside from the aforementioned email from Lee Jr. to Leland Jr., the most compelling exploration of the tension this can bring about is the lives of Reggie and Natasha Marshall’s twins, Caleb and Aaron.

  Aaron works for a real estate development company in Los Angeles while Caleb is a lawyer in their hometown of Cleveland. They’ve both found ways out of the poverty in which they grew up, but they are on divergent paths. Caleb spends his time, according to his brother, “living out his messiah dream as Lawyer for the Poor.” Caleb is only slightly more generous to himself:

  The only thing keeping him in the Midwest was inertia. Inertia and what psychotherapists would probably call a savior complex. He wasn’t afraid of admitting to it. Better to be a savior than a sociopath.

  The brothers share a similar impulse to ascribe pathology to what seems, on the surface, to be relatively normal moral behavior. This is made more striking by their consideration of Aaron’s job. A colleague is trying to get Aaron to help him purchase public housing complexes in Lynwood. Aaron, at the behest of his wife Netta, an accomplished artist whose work documents the lives of black subjects afflicted with poverty, is attempting to save the public housing and steer the buyer elsewhere. This despite the lingering negative feelings he has toward public complexes from his time living in one. He “hated how it felt living there, how people treated him for living there, how the other people there were always trying to beat him up and rip him off.” Neither brother takes much of a psychological interest in the origin of these feelings. For Aaron, it seems that the trauma of his childhood makes him resistant to doing the thing he knows is right, the thing that’s best for the most people and aligned with his moral position. What Frumkin is illuminating here is the manner in which pursuits that make more money — and Aaron makes a lot of money — are almost always considered more normal despite their destructive social value. That dynamic’s opposite, sacrificing money for a job that is fulfilling in a different way, is just as rational, but because it bucks capitalist logic, it requires an explanation. The fullness with which she approaches each perspective is what makes this possible.

  Alongside these conflicts within the characters’ own lives, Frumkin also explores society-level phenomena. The Bloom-Mittwoch family is Jewish and the Marshall family is black, and their similarities and differences are crucial. Leland Sr., a hapless incompetent with a philosophy degree, falls backward into a job because his friend runs a scrap shop. Reggie, a much savvier person, struggling to give his children a better life than his own, finds his way into drug dealing. He’s exceptional at it, though the requisite hazards catch up to him. There’s little ambiguity about how things would have gone if their resources and privileges were flipped.

  One of the issues on which the families align is on the subject of law enforcement. Reggie believes “you really [have] to pity anybody stupid enough to believe in the police” while Leland Sr. tells Leland Jr. one night that “there’s actually no such thing as a straight cop. They’re a gang. A violent gang.” Their experiences come from different places. Reggie has dealt with racist police practices his whole life, as a black man and as a drug dealer. Leland Sr. was a hippie at Kent State and saw the progressive armament of enforcers working to squelch protesters until his friends were among those eventually shot and killed. The Comedown also explores how this manifests concretely. Aaron, at 14, routinely finds himself and his friends subjected to baseless frisking.

  As the book goes on, Frumkin’s narrators come from further down the family tree, which is a handy means of exposing generational divides and inheritance. Lee Jr. is the youngest family member. He is diagnosed as having bipolar disorder in a significantly less stigmatizing (though still needlessly stigmatizing) world. The illicit drugs are better, which is good and bad. More than this, though, he’s inherited a world where, unlike his father or half-brother, he doesn’t see much of a future for himself. When he begins college in 2009, the economy is in a recession and the future feels clear in its darkness. The structures that propped up the successful people in his family are not there for him, and he does not know what to do. Still, Frumkin also shows the promise ahead. Lee Jr.’s best friend in college, born Edward Jonathan Phillips but called, at different times, Tarzan, Tweety, or New Person, is a gender fluid character with a safe space for exploring and expressing their true self.

  The matter-of-fact approach to writing about the complicated web of reasons why people’s lives turn out the way they do is essential to The Comedown’s success. Frumkin is also an accomplished journalist who has written about mental health, sex work, and other areas where the subjects are often mistreated or misunderstood. It shows here. The Comedown’s characters are cruel to one another and themselves for predictable reasons as well as for surprising ones. They are loving to one another and themselves in the same way. At its core, the book is about relationships and the joy and pain they bring. In that realm, and others, it’s a resounding success.

  ¤

  Bradley Babendir is a fiction writer and critic. He has written for the New Republic, The New Inquiry, WBUR’s The ARTery, and elsewhere.

• The Millions
  https://themillions.com/2018/04/narrative-is-back-on-rebekah-frumkins-the-comedown.html
  Word count: 2253

  Narrative Is Back: On Rebekah Frumkin’s ‘The Comedown’
  Reviews
  Andrew Ridker April 18, 2018 | 6 books mentioned 1 7 min read
  Related Books:

  In the frontmatter of Rebekah Frumkin’s debut novel, The Comedown, the reader is presented with two genealogy charts: one for the Marshalls, and one for the Bloom-Mittwochs. These are wild, unpruned, tangled family trees—more than a few names appear on both. Frumkin sets herself the task of filling in the stories behind these names, and in the more than 300 pages that follow, she does precisely that.

  The Comedown tracks the Marshalls, who are black, and the Bloom-Mittwochs, who are white and Jewish, over multiple generations. The two families are tied to one another by a briefcase full of money, which is to say, a plot device. When a hit job goes awry, a payment to the drug dealer Reggie Marshall ends up in the possession of one of his customers, Leland Bloom-Mittwoch Sr. His and Reggie’s descendants spend much of the novel chasing after it. “A briefcase,” one character says. “That’s symbolic. Like in a dream.” The briefcase is a classic MacGuffin, an artificial goal that gives the story purpose. But, breaking with authors like Rachel Cusk, for whom writing conventional fiction feels “fake and embarrassing,” or Karl Ove Knausgaard, who wrote in his My Struggle series that “the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous,” Frumkin isn’t ashamed to milk her MacGuffin for all its worth. She knows that narrative is artifice, but she also knows it’s fun.

  After a wonderfully dramatic prologue that finds Leland Sr. jumping off a hotel roof in Tampa to his death, Frumkin gives us a chapter centered on his first wife, Melinda Provouchez. We see Melinda as an adolescent in the ’50s and ’60s, traumatized by her mother’s binge eating; Melinda as an overweight mother in 2009, watching over her son in the hospital; Melinda as a student at Kent State in 1970; and Melinda’s search for the briefcase, also in 2009.

  Each chapter is dedicated to a single character who, in most cases, will not be the primary focus again. This structural gambit unfortunately results in a compartmentalized narrative. All 13 protagonists get their own chapter, with only one or two repeats. And because the chapters are structured like character sketches, every 15 or 20 pages the reader must reset and make mental space for a new set of personality quirks and childhood memories. As a result, much of the novel is given over to flashbacks and exposition. Each chapter demands the escape velocity of a short story.

  There is something democratic about Frumkin’s approach, giving nearly equal time to all the players, from the family patriarchs and matriarchs to Lee Jr.’s video game-obsessed, gender-nonbinary lover. But not all of the characters exert the same pressure on the story, and after a while the every-character-only-once model begins to feel like more of a constraint than an armature. The novel has less of a plot than a series of reoccurring motifs, the briefcase among them, nested in the character sketches. The Comedown soars, however, when characters we’ve already met, and who have left strong impressions—like Leland Sr.—appear in other characters’ chapters, not as reference points but in actual scenes, creating a more cohesive universe.

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  Leland Sr. serves as the novel’s true connective tissue. Unlike the self-assured intellectuals and defiant neurotics of Philip Roth novels, Leland is an exasperating drug addict. If he has a predecessor in American fiction it is Eugene Henderson of Henderson the Rain King, or better yet Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day, the Saul Bellow protagonists who, unlike Charlie Citrine or Moses Herzog, lack the wherewithal to self-diagnose, and self-medicate, with philosophy. But Bellow gives his novels over to these men; in The Comedown, Leland is one voice among many.

  Drugs, medicinal and recreational, shape the lives of almost every character. The Marshalls and the Bloom-Mittwochs are dealers, users, addicts, and abusers. Frumkin is attuned to the states these drugs induce, both within the user and without. A memorable chapter devoted to Lee Jr. (not to be confused with Leland Jr. or Leland Sr.) follows his plan to drug his half-brother (that’s Leland Jr.) against his will while under the influence of shrooms. Frumkin nimbly captures the anxiety, paranoia, and vulnerability of that experience. “He had the staticky, hippocampal impression that they were trapped in a snowdrift,” Lee thinks in the moments after stoned sex with a girl in his dorm, as missed calls and texts pile up on his phone.

  Devi was still on top of him and he was holding her, one hand at her back, one at her ass, as though she were in a front-slung papoose….She was breathing heavily. The room’s palette was set on a higher saturation than it had been when he and Devi had started…she was thinking about how fucked up he was, and how fake he was, and how little he deserved her… He was getting a shitty Pygmalion vibe from the whole thing and gently pushed her off him.

  Frumkin is whip-smart and funny. The writing is compulsively readable without being pedestrian. Sentences seem to vibrate. Here is Frumkin describing Temple Chaim Sheltok:

  Unlike the more modern synagogues in north Florida—the no-frills cement ones built by the Jewish retirees who’d floated south from New York and New Jersey, with Reform rabbis who wore guayabera shirts and kept kosher one day a week—the Temple Chaim Sheltok predated both World Wars.

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  Compare that to Zadie Smith’s description of the Glenard Oak school in White Teeth:

  It had been built in two simple stages, first in 1886 as a workhouse (result: large red monstrosity, Victorian asylum) and then added to in 1963 when it became a school (result: gray monolith, Brave New Council Estate).

  Both writers have a flair for detailing the social histories of buildings, neighborhoods, and families with an arch sense of humor deployed by a winking, not-entirely-objective third-person narrator.

  The Comedown is, in many ways, a throwback to the turn of the millennium. Like Smith, Frumkin’s debut employs a large, multiracial cast to explore issues of identity and history. But they most resemble one another on the level of style. Frumkin’s writing often calls to mind “hysterical realism,” James Wood’s term for the frenzied, information-rich novels of the late ’90s and early aughts by writers like David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, and Smith. These were novels that suffered, in Wood’s view, from an “excess of storytelling.” “The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine,” he wrote. “…Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, as these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion.”

  Wood succeeded in identifying the symptoms of this style, but whether or not they describe a disease is a question of taste. Diedre (not Deirdre—Frumkin loves a quirky name) Bloom-Mittwoch’s chapter opens like this:

  What had been happening in Diedre’s life prior to the summer of 1985, the month of July, when [Leland Sr.] drove up to the Shell where she worked in his 1976 green Ford Pinto, dressed in resort-owner pants and a guayabera, pupils massive behind a pair of expensive-looking Ray-Bans? She had been living with her girlfriend Trish in an efficiency above Sol’s Delicatessen…Trish who played drums in a hardcore band called Damocles Anthem that was moderately famous in the Orlando underground scene, playing places like Club Space Fish and D.I.Y. Records.

  Wood might argue, as he did of White Teeth, that details like these “vandalize each other.” And he might be right. (There’s that guayabera shirt again.) But this style has its advantages, namely that, when used well, it infuses a writer’s prose with a great deal of intelligence and energy, which is certainly the case in The Comedown. It’s rare that a novel this smart is such an engrossing read.

  In recent years, piece after piece has been written about whether white writers can (or should) write black characters, whether men can (or should) write female characters, and what we should make of sensitivity readers who comb novels for offensive material. Frumkin reminds us that these thorny questions of could and should are often a straightforward matter of imagination, empathy, and research. All of her characters are rendered with depth, portrayed with amusement and affection. Frumkin’s witty, third-person voice is as comfortable with the drug-dealing Reggie Marshall as it is his Melville scholar wife, Tasha; she can describe a tripping Lee Jr. just as well as she can Leland Jr., who works at a mutual fund and plans to invest in the very drug that Lee sprinkles on his fettuccine Alfredo.

  The Comedown is not, however, a work of gritty realism aiming to portray the lived realities of a diverse set of characters. It is a fundamentally comic novel (and a very funny one at that). Frumkin’s arch style sometimes risks flattening the individual characters under the force of her voice. But in a world of Cusks and Knausgaards, Teju Coles and Ben Lerners—all wonderful novelists in their own right—a novel like The Comedown, with its wide-angle lens and authoritative third-person style, is a reminder of what good old-fashioned fiction can do.

  cover
  cover
  Frumkin, like recent debut novelists Nathan Hill (The Nix) and Tony Tulathimutte (Private Citizens), writes like someone who grew up on Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Franzen, among others, writers whose generation-defining novels appeared at the turn of the millennium. The result is a number of new voices bucking the autofictional trend, breathing new life into the energetic, pyrotechnic, neo-Dickensian novels that Wood so famously knocked, where the unit of measurement is not the sentence or the paragraph but the anecdote. This is good news for the story-starved reader. Narrative is back, and it’s wearing new threads.
  The Millions' future depends on your support. Become a member today.

  Andrew Ridker 's debut novel, The Altruists, is forthcoming from Viking in 2019. It will be published in seventeen other countries. He is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He is currently an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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  One comment:

  Sean
  May 3, 2018 at 6:10 pm

  I agree that the book actually values narrative, and despite some millennial handwringing and the occasional dose of rather obvious let’s-cram-in-THIS-minority-so-I-don’t-seem-racist oblation to the leftists who control the publishing industry, I was heartily entertained and even occasionally impressed. This woman has a verve to her writing, her prose hums. There’s no waste. It’s propulsive and polyvocal. I also disagree with the reviewer Ridker regarding the “talents” of navel-gazing hacks like Knausgaard, bilious racists like Teju Cole, and the execrable Ben Lerner (he makes Dave Eggers look like Marcel Proust, and I find Eggers pretty tedious), but just about everything else in his review makes a lot of sense.
  Frumkin has a witty third-person voice that is comfortable in all of her characters (even the one obviously based on herself). Her characters have depth and the book is quite funny; a real rarity in literary fiction, which is why writers like Joyce and Heller are so treasured despite being, gasp, the wrong race, gender, and orientation for today’s minorities-only-allowed types. The wide-angle authority that Frumkin brings to both character and plot is uber-refreshing. She has command. She has talent. She belies her years with an earned maturity so lacking in the constituency-obsessed box checking of so much of the modern literary milieu, obsessed with ID politics and reparations instead of talent, innovation, and genius.
  I’m so happy themillions reviewed this book. I was glad to buy and read it in hardcover, and will recommend it heartily, especially to centrist and non-liberal readers like myself who, despite our old-school social progressivism and desire for legitimately objective and rational outcomes, tire of the man-hating and CIS-skewering and the subjectivity-is-everything purview, and long for capacious storytelling, well-wrought fiction, and impassioned chutzpah. Frumkin delivers on those last three qualities in abundance (even though I was forlorn that Shondor didn’t his own chapter). Even the character names and the epigraph from Hannah Arendt show a real diligence. I’m hopeful that this excellent book alludes to a return to meaningful fiction and a jettisoning of the pseudo-memoir mode that has co-opted and colonized and hegemonized so much of literary discourse over the last decade.

• Nylon
  https://nylon.com/articles/the-comedown-rebekah-frumkin
  Word count: 2772

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I think what inspired me to write this novel was my own growth as a human being, and the opportunity to see that reflected in the denouement of a narrative and in the addition of characters to that narrative, was, like, subconsciously what was motivating me,” \“It spurred me to think about how narrow in scope the book was and how much bigger I wanted it to be—how much bigger it could be—and so I started to explore different avenues, and try to create characters that were more indicative of the cross section of individuals on a city street,”
  “I took the white hypocrisy, I took the anxiety, I took the queerness—and I built a character around it, and I gave that character distinguishing features, as the character saw fit.”

  The Comedown” Is Like An SSRI For After You Read “Infinite Jest”
  Talking with author Rebekah Frumkin about her debut novel
  by Kristin Iversen · April 17, 2018
  “The Comedown” Is Like An SSRI For After You Read “Infinite Jest”

  "Oh my god, that's my dream," Rebekah Frumkin tells me over the phone. We're talking about her debut novel, The Comedown, and, after Frumkin comments that the novel could serve as a much-needed antidote, or even an "SSRI for after you read David Foster Wallace," I suggest that this should be the headline for our interview: "The Comedown Is an SSRI for After You Read Infinite Jest." Frumkin, it's clear, approves.

  It's the rare debut novel, though, that finds itself comparison with DFW's opus (even if that comparison is deliberately oppositional), and yet The Comedown more than deserves that kind of consideration. Taking place from the perspectives of over a dozen different characters, who are either members of two sprawling families—the Mittwoch-Blooms and the Marshalls—or intimately related to one clan or the other, The Comedown follows the disparate journeys of each individual, as they pursue with an often insatiable hunger wavy, warped versions of the American Dream.

  Hunger, or appetite, is a resonant theme of the book. Whether for drugs, money, love, or a sense of belonging, the characters within The Comedown are insatiable in their desire to get more and more of what they want. But, of course, there is an infinite number of things standing in the way of each person getting what he or she wants—including, at times, themselves.

  But as much as The Comedown is an epic in scope and intention, it is fundamentally different from what our culture usually prioritizes as epics, those door stopper novels usually written by cis, straight white men, in that The Comedown offers an array of American experiences, voices from places of traditional privilege—white and straight and wealthy—and from the perspectives of those who don't. It grapples with big issues—race, sexuality, economic power, religion, the weirdness of Florida—and Frumkin imbues each page with a specificity and near-disorienting dark sense of humor. But, much as your eyes do at night, you adjust to the darkness, and a whole new world opens up to you, one filled with an infinite amount of things to explore, to learn and relearn about, to consider maybe for the first time.

  Below, I speak with Frumkin about what inspired her to write this novel, what parts were most difficult for her to write, and the problem with well-meaning "liberal" white women.

  What inspired you to write this book, about these people, in this time and place? Or, I guess, times and places.
  I think what inspired me to write this novel was my own growth as a human being, and the opportunity to see that reflected in the denouement of a narrative and in the addition of characters to that narrative, was, like, subconsciously what was motivating me. I actually started writing this novel with just three to 10 white men [as the characters], and they were in this money and power triangle, and they were like fighting each other. I wanted to write a muscular, manly novel, you know? I was in my early 20s and not really understanding how marginalization worked, and how sort of oppressive social forces were at play even in literature; even in creative circles, you could still encounter these oppressive forces, and I was kind of playing into them. And then I experienced illness-related complications, and it spurred me to think about how narrow in scope the book was and how much bigger I wanted it to be—how much bigger it could be—and so I started to explore different avenues, and try to create characters that were more indicative of the cross section of individuals on a city street.

  And [for Cleveland and Florida, where most of the book takes place] the interesting thing, too, [is that] Cleveland and Florida have this in common, where they're places where people are accustomed to feeling defeat. Cleveland, especially, before LeBron, they're used to feeling a lot of defeat; there was a lot of dying industries, and all the car manufactures kind of closed up shop; there's just a lot of jobs that were lost. And in Florida, Florida is just like... I don't even know what's going on in Florida.

  One of the ones who I found most fascinating was Jocelyn, who is a privileged white woman with lots of pretensions to progressiveness. How was it to write from her perspective?
  Jocelyn was a delight to write because she was sort of like the punching bag of the novel. She is white hypocrisy, she is a white feminist. She does not understand the degree to which her neo-liberal meddling does harm and how, in the community she's claiming to help and these causes she's claiming to advance, she's actually setting them back, just by being the way she is, which is narcissistic as fuck. So to write Jocelyn, I simply had to look around me, but also look inward at my own hypocrisy and ways in which I had acted earlier in my life, and even later gone on liberal crusades instead of behaving in a way that was like intersectional and mindful.

  Did you incorporate different parts of yourself in all the characters to some degree?
  Basically, I took something from myself that I know exists—I took the white hypocrisy, I took the anxiety, I took the queerness—and I built a character around it, and I gave that character distinguishing features, as the character saw fit. Which is kind of a way of saying, like, I just sort of wrote blindly with no real plan in mind... but, yeah, that's kind of how I'd say I went about it. [laughs]

  Not to sound super-corny, but that idea of having a bit of yourself in all these very different people... isn't that ideally, like, the human experience? That we realize that there is something that we can connect to with every person? It's not even exactly seeing yourself in the other characters, but it's just a reminder of the vastness of humanity.
  I mean, that's exactly how I would say it.

  And, I mean, there are ways in which that's a comfort, but there's also a lot you do with this novel, that art is supposed to do, namely, make people uncomfortable. And one way you do that, I think, is through the fact that you present these characters in all their imperfections with no moral judgment of them. Even though some are, like, maybe "better" people than others, there's no moralizing whatsoever, even as we, as readers, come to our own moral judgments on certain characters, like Jocelyn. How did you avoid the dichotomy of "good" and "bad"? Like, how do you make their appetites—and some of them have very rapacious ones—not be the only thing that defines them?
  One thing that really helped me write this book was to watch someone I love, love a person with an addiction. And it's not a romantic love, but more of like a close familiar love, which kind of makes it more poignant—not that romantic love isn't poignant to me. This person whom I love, we'll call this person A, let's say, person A would always suffer at the hands of person B, and I'd be like, Wow, person B is really bad, the things they've done are very bad, they should feel bad. But the more I learned about person B, I learned about their life, I learned about their children, their family, I learned a lot, actually, I was like, Well, clearly things aren't all bad. I had to reexamine that situation. Nothing had changed, I just learned more information, and person B had become more human to me. Essentially, I was like, Wow, this is really complex because there's this whole web of interactions between person B and the world, and person B and person A, and person A and the world. And nothing added up to, "Oh, the bad drug addict," or "the long-suffering caretaker." It simply doesn't add up to that. This book was a way for me to explore loving and caring for those who are difficult to love, because I love every single one of those characters—even the most awful character I'm still invested in.

  And then some of the characters aren't awful, but just go through awful things, even though it doesn't fully define them. I'm thinking of the Tarzan/Tweety chapter, which is one in which a teenager comes to term with their sexuality, and it has some profoundly upsetting moments, but also ones of real beauty.
  I was very self-conscious about making sure that it wasn't, like, another queer sad story, where it's just like, they're still unhappy after they come out, and they get bullied, and then their partner dies.

  How much of this did you have plotted out when you first started writing it?
  I really didn't have anything plotted, because I was really committed to writing that triangle of straight white men book, and it was gonna be really short and funny, and I had a perfect vision for it. [And then,] someone in workshop, when I submitted a section, a woman was just like, "Where are the women? There are no women in this." And that was the beginning of my awakening to a broader, bigger novel, because I was just like, Why am I leaving out women? Like, what's that all about? I mean, I write from the male perspective almost automatically because I grew up reading white men, and it's been like a decade-long process of reprogramming. And we have to get over that area of miseducation, but I think that workshop comment started me thinking about that. I was just like, Oh, maybe I should start writing from the female perspective, what's wrong with that? But, yeah, I just didn't have anything planned until I was still hammering plot stuff out with my editor after the book was acquired.

  It's definitely more of a character study than just pure plot, but writing some of the characters, specifically the ones who are a different race and gender than you... was that difficult?
  I definitely felt the need to basically be as transparent and empathetic and sensitive as possible when writing characters of color, because I think that a lot of the times—not all of the time—but what I personally have seen a lot of is white writers being like, "Okay, it's time for my big award; it's time for my laurel. I'm gonna write a character of color." I'm so sorry to bring up Infinite Jest in this interview, but I always remember this really racist part in Infinite Jest where, for absolutely no reason, there's this super-racist monologue of a black woman. It's outlandishly offensive; I am shocked that in 1996 with Will Brown or whoever it was actually let this go to print. But that was David Foster Wallace being like, "Hey, look at me, I can write in any voice; like, take that Bret Easton Ellis. My dick is bigger. "So in a lot of that kind of behavior, my feeling is that people should be able to write across difference, and a person with privilege should be able to write a character who is marginalized, but, boy, have they gotta do that with empathy.

  And I think the key is, they've got to distinguish between having that character and breathing life into that character and treating them well, and telling a story that's not their own. And so I've had a lot of conversations about this with [writer] Tony Tulathimutte. He read a draft of my book just for everything—he was reading for structure, plot, style, everything—and he was just like, "Hey, just so you know, this person of color, this is really fucked-up. You really fucked this up." And I was like, "Yeah, fair. That's completely fair." And we talked about how it's not my place to be like, "Okay, this is the black experience in America." Like, it's really not my place to weigh in on that. And I thought I was avoiding that, but, in fact, I was sort of over-indicating things about race that made me come across as disingenuous. And then, I pulled back and was like, Okay, this is my place, let me stay in my lane; I can have this character of color, and I can have the truth of the character, but I can't get on some bizarre soapbox and start like shouting off about the marginalized experience that doesn't belong to me.

  So that's why I was really careful with the entire Marshall family. Race forms their experience, but I gotta be really fucking careful. Race forms their experience in so far as they must live under white supremacy, just like sexuality forms my experience in so far as I must live under a heteropatriarchy. But the unique aspects of their struggle is not mine to write, not mine to touch on, so I made sure to kind of leave that out, whereas characters like Tarzan/Tweety, I am able to comment on the history of that queer kind of oppression.

  The thing is, people don't understand that identity also comes into play for members of the dominant culture. Like, men are affected by gender in the same way that feminist women are; it's real, it affects them. They just derive power from it, whereas some women are disempowered by it. And when you derive power from something, that thing is somehow erased, but the reality of that thing still damages us, and you just become powerful sans context. So I was using that kind of as a guiding principle writing the book, too, where it's, like, the book was originally about three white men, but it was supposed to be making a mockery of masculinity. And I think that I didn't lose sight of that goal, even as the book theme multiplied and the scope expanded, I still wanted to make sure that I pointed out how ridiculous white men are. So Tony Tulathimutte and Okezie Nwoka, those are the two people who read my whole manuscript. They were two readers, who are friends of mine, [and] these two guys picked up on the race aspect.

  It's such an important balance to strike as a writer, having to be aware but also not letting yourself be handicapped. Having trusted readers go through it and then give you their ungarnished opinions is probably the best possible thing, as long as you're receptive; it's what every author should have or should want to have, so they're not pulling a David Foster Wallace and having a dick measuring contest with Bret Easton Ellis.
  That's actually the highest compliment I could possibly receive. That it's like the SSRI for when you think about David Foster Wallace.

  That's actually like a good headline: "The Comedown is like an SSRI for after you read Infinite Jest."
  Oh my god, that's my dream, actually.

  The Comedown is available for purchase here.

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• Full Stop
  http://www.full-stop.net/2018/04/19/reviews/pete-tosiello/the-comedown-rebekah-frumkin/
  Word count: 2113

  Quoted in Sidelights: “As The Comedown documents the trials, both unique and universal, facing each generation of Marshalls and Bloom-Mittwoches, it makes for a convincing cross-section of American trauma and coping.” remarked Pete Tosiello on the Full Stop website. He continued: “Frumkin’s race writing in The Comedown is perceptive and modulated. Both the Jewish and black families are recognizable yet atypical, and the intersection of white guilt with sexual fulfillment makes for some of the book’s most compelling, if delicate, passages.”
  “The Comedown’s non-chronological narrative can make for rough going early on, but as Frumkin leaves no heartstring untugged, it makes the exposition suspenseful in itself. … Frumkin’s characters linger long after the final page, such that finishing the book is a comedown of its own.”

  The Comedown – Rebekah Frumkin
  by Pete Tosiello

  The Comedown cover[Henry Holt; 2018]

  Two gnarled, adjacent family trees printed in the flyleaf of Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown serve to weed out the warier of would-be travelers. The webbed pedigree charts indicate short, brutal lives marked by unfaithfulness and deception, generations worth of deadbeats and philanderers. Bloodlines reduced to dates and grids, they are composed of people with silly names and frivolous existences, men and women who choose selfishness and self-centeredness despite the obvious repercussions on their extended relations.

  A multigenerational midwestern saga with an omniscient narrator pivoting among characters on a chapterly basis, Frumkin’s debut may find itself sharing shelf space with Franzen and Chabon. Yet The Comedown’s panoramic shots of addiction, trauma, mental illness, and suicide are hardly well-trod territory. Where many of these sweeping ancestral chronicles are more than happy to bog themselves down in bulk and detail, Frumkin encompasses some seventy years and dozens of characters in just over 300 pages, breezily leaping between decades and perspectives, the only real through-line a murky plot device following a suitcase full of drug money to which both families feel entitled.

  Although of two worlds in many senses, the Jewish Bloom-Mittwoches and African-American Marshalls share a city, Cleveland, and a streak of compulsions which entangle them briefly in its criminal underworld. And while a 1973 drug heist serves as the centripetal moment upon which the narrative orbits, the saga stretches back as far as the 1940s, tracking pivotal events in each character’s life and comprising a veritable postwar mosaic. The lives rendered in each chapter are self-contained only to the point where each character proves ultimately incapable of escaping whichever ancestral bondage is his birthright.

  With a tapestry which brings to mind a nineteenth-century naturalist novel, The Comedown supplies a dozen hypotheses on how children become their eventual adult selves, isolating the inputs which produce divergence among even siblings and spouses. Frumkin’s brisk pacing alights on the episodes — in school, in temple, in hospital wards and illicit lovers’ beds — which define lives and families. “It was funny,” considers young Diedre Bloom-Mittwoch looking back at a failed relationship, “how two very similar people could start out in the same shitty place and one could end up so much better than the other.” Revelations occur during ruminations before the television set and conversations conducted in adjacent car seats, all parties’ eyes facing the uncertain road before them.

  As The Comedown documents the trials, both unique and universal, facing each generation of Marshalls and Bloom-Mittwoches, it makes for a convincing cross-section of American trauma and coping. Frumkin portrays addicts unsparingly and sympathetically, their mistreatment of others presented alongside the myriad ways they’ve been wronged themselves. From dorm room potheads to overprescribed board room execs to skid row coke fiends, they’re seemingly functional until the moment they’re not, regardless of how acceptable society labels their specific vices of choice. The luridness which imbues both families’ trying domestic scenes only rarely overlaps with actual malice.

  Bloom-Mittwoch patriarch Leland Sr. is a manic romantic and lifelong addict governed by a heedless fatalism which ruins his first marriage:

  He slammed the fridge closed and turned to face her. “You want my son”—he used his entire hand, palm up, to gesture to the boy—“to grow up to be the kind of guy who has to go talk to some fat old faggot about his problems because he can’t handle them himself?” He’d matched his son’s decibel level and then quickly exceeded it. “You told me to try it, I tried it, it didn’t work. Enough!”

  Needless to say his impulsive rants haunt his son Leland Jr. long after his seedy Gulf Coast suicide. And his sycophantic relationship with his resigned dealer Reggie Marshall makes for poignant commentary on the relationship of users and their ambivalent enablers. Through the clamorous ups and downs of Leland Sr.’s chemically-induced life the reader appreciates a tactile shift in acceptance of the varying methods and levels of his habit. Where getting high was a source of glamor among his set of ‘60s campus radicals, it’s anything but as he abandons his son, tearing through the bowels of Cleveland at the height of withdrawal searching for his dealer. “When the fight and his paranoia had escalated,” recalls Diedre, his second wife, “she remembered thinking that all of her friends had known when to stop partying.”

  Deftly skirting the borders of angsty generational criticism, The Comedown speculates on the manifold ways parents manage to screw up kids. Among the novel’s elders are criminals, brawlers, runaways, body-shamers, malignant racists, apathetic ignoramuses, and imbalanced cutthroats in addition to your garden variety addicts. Most heartbreaking of all are the few parents who actually are compassionate and well-meaning, yet equally helpless in the face of their children’s struggles. For all the havoc wrought by their parents, it’s practically a miracle how well-adapted most of the progeny seem, but this too is its own facade — the children adapt and act out in ways both reminiscent of and foreign to their bewildered folks.

  The most finely wrought among Frumkin’s ensemble cast is Aaron Marshall, Reggie’s fiercely loyal son who spends his adolescence overburdened by his unmoored mother, Tasha, and wimpy twin brother Caleb. Aaron is sensible beyond his years but jealous and wary of the figures who’ve disappointed him, and his chapter exhibits The Comedown’s most precise writing, efficiently staking the territories of allegiance and antipathy in childhood and brotherhood. Despite — or perhaps because of — his receiving the roughest hand of the novel’s misfortunates, an unemotional pragmatism is all he can afford. “Fuck if the world was going to make him hang himself,” he vows while analyzing the ravage of death in his own family. “It sure as hell was giving him the rope, though.”

  The Comedown has all the makings of a serious downer, opening with a suicide and containing multiple failed attempts therein. The sex is depraved, the drugs are ubiquitous, and the violence veers into absurdism. There are chapters devoted to manic depression, assault, gender identity, police brutality, and cults. Piloted by a heavier, more self-serious hand The Comedown would be a tragic history of modern American misery, where a lighter touch might have resulted in an afterschool special. Counteracting the content with an amiable tone is perhaps the greatest of the challenges posed by Frumkin’s dire, coiling narrative, and it is accordingly her greatest feat. She is able to simultaneously love, denounce, and lampoon her deeply troubled characters, extracting shreds of wistful humanity from even the most harrowing scenes. Taken together, the dozen coming-of-age tales start to coalesce as a madcap comedy, but there are no cheap laughs.

  The Great Midwestern Novels which provide The Comedown’s most immediate reference points remain impressive in their postmodern ambition, their multigenerational heft, and their frank looks at depressed people in depressed places. Yet Franzen and Chabon’s difficulties stabilizing tone with narrative just as frequently mire their tomes in glorified navel-gazing. Their hyperarticulate dialogue and inexplicable whimsy clash with their identifiable types and settings; they write people of color as if they’ve only encountered them in Morgan Freeman films.

  While a few of The Comedown’s characters exhibit a saccharine quaintness ostensibly ill-suited for their desperation, the sprightly pacing means their deep backgrounds are executed in brief snapshots, and Frumkin manages to sympathize with them without needing to occupy them herself. Frequently, this buoyant tone approximates a tangibly midwestern pragmatism mirrored by the characters themselves. When the protagonists resort to humor and tongue-in-cheek optimism, it’s not to disclaim their neuroses so much as a flailing effort to keep from drowning beneath them.

  Frumkin’s race writing in The Comedown is perceptive and modulated. Both the Jewish and black families are recognizable yet atypical, and the intersection of white guilt with sexual fulfillment makes for some of the book’s most compelling, if delicate, passages. After Reggie’s disappearance, Leland Sr. takes it upon himself to look after his family but ends up conducting a tawdry affair with Reggie’s wife Tasha. One of the sharpest chapters follows Jocelyn Woodward, Leland Sr.’s daughter-in-law, and the evolution of an immobilizing white female complex. After losing her virginity to a mixed-race co-ed at her New England prep school, she’s governed by a lifelong infatuation with black men which manifests itself in shame as frequently as in aggrandizement. Her unspoken privilege informs a vague sense of duty which more often than not proves destructive, culminating in an ill-advised affair with Caleb Marshall.

  “He was, essentially, responding to a distress call from a bunch of rich white people,” Caleb considers upon finding himself in bed with Jocelyn. “Mom would call these his reparations. He took them over and over again, from every crevice Jocelyn made available to him, took them until she was sweating and laughing, laid up on her back looking up at him, saying could he please just give her five minutes in the bathroom to tidy up, she’d honestly never gone that long before.” Unbeknownst to either of them is the depth of the reparations — racial, material, and sexual — between their families.

  As the narrative surges forward the second- and third-generation characters have seemingly less relevance to the overarching plot, but lest it spin out of control the final two chapters, set in present day, are standalone triumphs. The chapter which follows Tarzan, a friend of Leland Sr.’s youngest son Lee, contains a high school bullying scene which is the book’s masterstroke. The following chapter, chronicling the childhood and American education of Lee’s girlfriend Maria, an emotionally sensitive savant, is magnificent. These episodes, which might easily have been extraneous, comprise a dramatic climax seventy years in the making, and Frumkin’s attunement to the nuances of suffering and rebirth make for a profoundly rewarding final act.

  Watching the Marshall and Bloom-Mittwoch clans stagger into the twenty-first century, the characters’ individual comedowns — dark nights of the soul in rehab, psych wards, and seedy motel rooms — adhere into what might be termed something of a societal comedown, although it’s impossible to identify a fall from grace among even the most starry-eyed of the ancestors. The concept of the American Dream becomes laughable given the lifelong struggles these educated, well-meaning midwesterners face in becoming even passably functional.

  The Comedown’s non-chronological narrative can make for rough going early on, but as Frumkin leaves no heartstring untugged, it makes the exposition suspenseful in itself. If it’s a trick, it’s a brilliant and thrilling one, with each pivot and retread diligently plotted. Beholding the generations of lovable, near irredeemable Marshalls and Bloom-Mittwoches, one wonders indeed how far back we might trace the sources of a family’s anxieties, the original sins of the original fathers, a neurotic first mover. The Comedown is a romp which never loses track of its compassion, messy in a charismatic, lifelike way, a giant, leaping wash of twentieth and twenty-first century Americana which never lapses into cliche. Frumkin’s characters linger long after the final page, such that finishing the book is a comedown of its own.

  Pete Tosiello‘s literary criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His music writing has appeared in SPIN, Vice, Forbes, and The Atlantic. He lives in New York City and works in technology.

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• Chicago Review of Books
  https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/04/17/the-comedown-rebekah-frumkin-interview/
  Word count: 830

  Rebekah Frumkin Will Change the Way You See Cleveland

  A conversation with the Chicago-based author of 'The Comedown.'
  by Adam Morgan
  April 17, 2018
  Comments 0

  Named after Margaret Anderson’s literary magazine founded in Chicago in 1914, The Little Interview asks Chicago poets and writers about their reading, writing, and relationship with Chicago.

  Rebekah Frumkin’s debut novel, The Comedown, is the multi-generational story of two Cleveland families connected by a single evening in 1973, when one patriarch witnesses the murder of the other. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Rebekah’s in the middle of a master’s degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Her writing has appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and you can meet her (and Rebecca Makkai) at a launch party for The Comedown on May 2 at Volumes Bookcafe.

  rf
  How did you wind up in Chicago?

  I was born in Arlington Heights and raised in the northwest suburbs, so I guess I’ve always been a denizen of the “metro area”; fate kept me from being a true Chicagoan until a few years ago, when I finally moved to Edgewater. Now I live in Andersonville and have no desire to leave.
  What are you reading right now?

  I just finished Andrea Lawlor’s phantasmagoric Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl and dove into the earnest ribaldry of Joey Comeau’s Lockpick Pornography. I’ve also been reading Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant and Rachel Heng’s Suicide Club, two great books readers should be on the lookout for this summer.
  Of all the books you could have written, how and why did you settle on this one?

  There’s probably something to be said for how my psychological profile and history of occasional substance use uniquely predisposed me to write a book about a cast of mentally unwell characters.
  Why did you write about Cleveland?

  Chicago — former city of my suburban dreams, current home — is a place too close to my heart. Setting my first book in Chicago would feel like opening my fridge to strangers for inspection: here’s the weird half-plate of takeout swimming in soy sauce, here’s a wilting head of lettuce, here’s some mac n’ cheese I couldn’t bring myself to finish. I’m already making myself vulnerable to criticism by writing a book, so why make Chicago vulnerable too?

  When I learned that the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, the year when many of my characters would have been up and about and debauching, I knew I had to set the book in Cleveland. So I visited Cleveland and ate a Happy Dog vegan sausage slathered in Marcella’s grape jelly chili sauce, hung out at the Flats at midnight, and chatted up the barbers at Smitty’s Seaway Barbershop. The city cast its Rust Belt spell on me, and I knew I could write well from that spellbound place.
  What is your favorite book about (or set in) Chicago?

  It’s a tie between The Jungle and The Middlesteins. The Jungle because, clumsy and clunky though it may be, it’s a fantastic example of writing-for-social-change, and the first example I was ever exposed to. The Middlesteins because I can relate to the experience of being an awkward Jew in the Chicago suburbs.
  Where do you usually write? Do you have any favorite public writing spaces in Chicago?

  Speaking of Judaism: I tend to wander. I have no one place that really does the trick for me. Instead, I’ll get bursts of work done in various settings. I wrote a bunch of The Comedown in my girlfriend’s old condo in Andersonville. I spent a whole summer writing exclusively in a Pilsen coffee shop that’s since been bulldozed by gentrification. I’ve even gotten some writing done under extreme duress in Northwestern Memorial Hospital. If anyone’s looking for a place to write—and doesn’t mind writing longhand—I’d recommend Promontory Point on the South Side and Hollywood (Osterman) Beach on the North Side.
  What forthcoming books from Chicago-based writers are you excited about?

  I’m excited about anything and everything written by Kyle Beachy, Kristin Lueke, and Cristina Vanko.

  9781250127525_e4ee1

  FICTION
  The Comedown
  By Rebekah Frumkin
  Henry Holt
  Published April 17, 2018
  TagsCleveland • Henry Holt • Rebekah Frumkin • The Comedown
  About Adam Morgan

  Adam Morgan is the editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review of Books. He writes about books, arts and culture, and Chicago in The Guardian, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Bookpage, Chicago magazine, and elsewhere.
  adam-stephen-morgan.com
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• Shelf Awareness
  http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=3212#m39858
  Word count: 544

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  Home » The Comedown by Rebekah Frumkin, review by Bruce Jacobs
  The Comedown by Rebekah Frumkin, review by Bruce Jacobs

  Rebekah Frumkin's first novel, The Comedown, wanders into a dark labyrinth of tangled relationships between two Ohio families--the Jewish Bloom-Mittwochs and African American Marshalls. Prefaced with a useful guide to their family trees of marriages, divorces, affairs and children, the novel is like a three-part ensemble play, with chapters focused on each of the dozen principal characters as their lives intersect over the rocky course of the last 50 years.

  The Marshall patriarch, Reggie, is a hustler and drug dealer from Cleveland's Hough neighborhood, where a black man in the 1970s has limited options. Heading the Bloom-Mittwoch clan, Leland Sr. is one of Reggie's regular customers. A survivor of the 1960s drug scene and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations (including the nearby Kent State National Guard shooting), he never shakes his quest for the perfect high.

  Early in the novel, Leland Sr. takes a suicidal leap off a building in Tampa in 1999, and Reggie takes a bullet to the head at his massage parlor headquarters in 1973. Frumkin is not as much interested in the ultimate fates of her characters as she is in the role of fate in determining the directions their lives take. As Leland Sr.'s first wife tells their son Leland Jr., "No real purpose to it all, just waves you either crested or were crushed by."

  With graduate degrees from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, Frumkin writes with both satirical flair and vestiges of observational reporting. Underlying the Midwestern lives of both families are pervasive drug use, religious skepticism, prodigious sexual appetites and ambivalent gender preferences. Generous use of drug slang, Yiddish expressions and explicit eroticism may require a certain hipster intellectual savvy--or open tabs on Urban Dictionary and a Yiddish phrasebook. Frumkin also knows her stuff about video game code and speed chess with "a rook-knight combo... galloping across the board G8 to F6, F6 to G4."

  The Comedown, however, is not just a simplistic morality play about the United States' economic and racial divide. Rather, Frumkin has created a snapshot of authentic people in a real place, where the insidious dissolution of families is as much the result of bad choices among bad alternatives as it is the consequence of ubiquitous drug use and spiritual detachment. If she offers a glimmer of hope, it is the modest one suggested by Leland Sr.'s second wife: "He'd been through what he'd been through, and she'd been through what she'd been through, their pasts didn't count and their future seemed manageable, if not bright." Tough talk from a talented debut novelist with a sharp eye.

  Bruce Jacobs's review first appeared in Shelf Awareness.
  Staff Pick Logo
  The Comedown Cover Image
  The Comedown (Hardcover)
  By Rebekah Frumkin
  $27.00
  Quoted in Sidelights: “is not just a simplistic morality play about the United States’ economic and racial divide. Rather, Frumkin has created a snapshot of authentic people in a real place.”

  ISBN: 9781250127525
  Availability: On Our Shelves Now
  Published: Henry Holt & Company - April 17th, 2018

• Book Page NOTE FROM TRUDY: DUPLICATE OF PRINT REVIEW
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/22560-rebekah-frumkin-comedown
  Word count: 300

  May 2018
  The Comedown
  The center will not hold

  BookPage review by Trisha Ping

  Fractured family dynamics and the search for a missing fortune are the main threads of this textured debut, set mostly in Cleveland, Ohio, over the course of three decades.

  The Comedown centers on the families of two men: Leland Bloom-Mittwoch and his drug dealer, Reggie Marshall. Reggie sees Leland as an unstable client; Leland, however, considers Reggie his best friend. Leland is present the day Reggie is shot, and he flees the scene, distraught, with a briefcase full of money. Over the ensuing years, Leland struggles with addiction and mental illness, wrecks his first marriage, enters into a second and has a damaging affair, while Reggie’s wife, who was once a promising student, is left to raise their two boys in poverty, alone. Through several tantalizing plot twists, the lives of the Bloom-Mittwoch and Marshall clans remain intertwined in a network of simmering tension, blame and guilt.

  First-time author Rebekah Frumkin, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is generous with her characters and their frailties. Each point of view (and there are many) feels distinct; often, the same events are shown through the eyes of different characters, adding dimension. Although some readers might find it disorienting to be launched into another point of view just when they’ve settled into the current one, the novel’s nonlinear, fragmented structure reflects its themes of disconnection and the uneasy mental states of most of the characters.

  Messy, meandering and occasionally illuminating, The Comedown is a family saga that recalls real life.

  This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

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