This book has the premise of a disaster that strikes downtown Chicago, leaving a number of people dead, including the family members of the protagonist, Gladman, a Jewish comedian. Alternating with his struggles to get on with his life, we see the efforts of Chicago’s mayor and his Jewish top aide, a sort of Stephen Miller, to exercise control over the spin and recovery.

Throughout the story, the author uses the opportunity to riff on what interests him in a way that is clever, but which I also found to be offensive and not at all funny. Levin reminds me a bit of the late works of Philip Roth - yeah, you can’t deny his brilliance, but you could do without the scatology, crudeness, and what I took to be a self-hating sort of antisemitism. ( )