Adam Kirsch Reviews Bruce Jay Friedman's Masterful New Collection, 'The Peace Process'
Bruce Jay Friedman has been a stalwart of American Jewish fiction for 50 years, ever since the publication of his debut novel Stern in 1962. Now 85 years old, he has written 19 books and several hit screenplays, including Stir Crazy and Splash. His work helped to create what we now think of as the voice of Jewish comedy—zany yet bleakly ironic, knowingly self-deprecating. Yet he has never enjoyed the commanding fame of a Philip Roth or a Neil Simon; and the Friedman-like characters we meet in his new book of short stories, The Peace Process, are uniformly haunted by a sense of not quite having made it. They are middling writers or show-business veterans clinging to the unglamorous margins of the industry, dreaming of their glory days and hoping to make a comeback.
Thus the narrator of “The Big Sister” is a former producer of Las Vegas shows who “found myself being sidelined, squeezed out” and tries to make a living putting on Chekhov one-acts on the Lower East Side: “Wasn’t Chekhov supposed to be money in the bank? Done tastefully, of course. Maybe if I’d set the plays in a bowling alley.” In “Any Number of Little Old Ladies,” an aging playwright is so desperate for a hit that he ignores his wife’s warning not to write a character based on her: “Perhaps I’m being overly sensitive, but if you don’t mind, I’d rather the whole world didn’t know about the yodeling when I climax, or the Girl Scout costume,” she tells him. As these examples suggest, Friedman’s jokes are broad and direct, and they arrive right on the beat—we are clearly in the hands of a comedy professional.