Through these mouthpieces, Cohen, a sort of one-man improvisational showman whose riffs veer from the Talmudic to scatological scat, holds forth on history, music, philosophy, theology, art, Jewishness, and the Holocaust. The book consists largely of a sustained, erudite set of free-associations on, for instance, the difficulty of writing about music, what it means to be Jewish, what makes some art transcendent versus mediocre, and the role of the individual in directing the arrow of history. The characters’ intellectual acumen overshadows the traces of their bigotry, especially directed against Asians, and the misogynistic streak each harbors. Cohen’s characters are anything but politically correct; Jews aren’t spared either, and all is subsumed under a general misanthropy, humans faring rather poorly when compared to music. These prejudices are inflected with a profound irony, given that Schneidermann is himself a Holocaust survivor. Cohen baldly exposes warts, rendering characters who are sympathetic yet flawed. Both main characters have a tragic dimension, but it is Laster who ultimately cuts the most tragic figure: six-times over a failure as a husband, estranged from each of his children, and left in the end without even his erstwhile companion.
Cohen’s book sometimes reminds one of Beckett’s trilogy in its comic sensibility, its embracing of the lowly and bodily, and the implication that speaking is fundamentally a way of holding the abyss at bay. What sets Cohen’s book apart from such forbearers is how wonderfully, deliriously steeped it is in the world of music. The book teems with musical allusions and puns, with its descriptions of “flat daughters [and] a sharp mother,” its reflections on Beethoven’s “mania for motivic expansion,” and even a device as simple as replacing “shhhhh” with “pppppppppp.” It’s not all puns, though. Cohen’s own writing is best characterized as musical, such as when he renders “a Russian girl…a prodigy, much fire, lacking technique, unpolished and hot as wild, body boyish up top but bulging below, 19th century thighs…gorgeous in that frumpy concert dress of hers when the straps they fall in the midst of a fast passage to expose her sweaty nibs.” In another instance, he describes film as our “covenant with colors, the flood of all those typhus-yellows and neckbound reds.” Cohen prefaces all this