Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you love mid-career Woody Allen, you might love this book. You might also love it if you're into angst and want to read many pages about people full of angst, who spend their waking hours worrying about angst, wondering what to do about their angst (or, indeed, whether to do anything at all), asking who's to blame for all that angst, trying (and mostly failing) to find a meaning in angst, even questioning whether their angst is real or whether they're imagining it. All that angst is, of course, finally, about being Jewish (or not). No one, not even Jews, spends 90 percent of his waking hours thinking about being Jewish. The writing really is very good, and there's genuine humor to be found here. There are also sharp observations of current behavior in some of the peripheral events. However, the characters seem to have been created mostly to represent various "types"--they verge on being stock characters who rarely, if ever, come fully to life. The women are, I think, better drawn, but they exist mostly as foils for the men, who chug through life debating with themselves and occasionally with each other--mostly about angst. Their relationships, even with each other, seem barely skin deep, and I was unable to establish a relationship with any of them. No one seems to get anywhere--at least nowhere he could explain to himself--and perhaps that's the point. For me, however, it's not a point worth all those pages to make. The only other point seems to be to say that Jews are still whining and kvetching, and that's a point I neither agree with nor approve of.