Tell Me How This Ends Well

The year is 2022. Israel is no more. Having been annexed by its hostile neighbouring countries, its citizens are now global refugees, many of them relocating to the States, which has subsequently become a forcing house for violent racism: everywhere Jews find they are subject to widespread verbal abuse, anti-Semitic public demonstrations and targeted murders.

Amid this tumult we encounter the three Jacobson siblings assembling in LA for Passover: Jacob, a small-beer playwright who has travelled from Berlin with Dieter, his German boyfriend; Edith, a divorced ethics professor from Atlanta currently enmeshed in a sexual harassment suit; and Moses, a failed actor best known for a starring alongside his bad-tempered wife and their five sons in a now cancelled reality TV show. All three have muddled towards a vague agreement that they will murder their father Julian – an exemplar of the bullying, sadistic patriarch who evades cliché simply by being such an extreme case – whom they suspect of plotting to quicken the demise of Roz, their meek and terminally ill mother.

I reviewed David Samuel Levinson's new novel, Tell Me How This Ends Well, for Litro.

You can read the full review here.