THE CHÂTEAU

Fiction
Death of the Butt God

THE CHÂTEAU

By Paul Goldberg

384 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Lynne M. Hinkey, author of Marina Melee

The Château is a humorous, often tragic, look at what it means to be an American, an immigrant, and an outsider in the land of opportunity. According to the back cover, The Château, is the story of down-and-out former-science reporter, William M. Katzenelenbogen. Newly fired from his job at the Washington Post, he finds new purpose investigating the seamy death of his college roommate, the famous plastic surgeon known as “The Butt God of Miami Beach.”

While his investigation runs softly through the background, that storyline turns out to be a relatively minor subplot, as do the shenanigans of the board of directors at his father’s south Florida condo. Both of these play more of a supporting role giving context to the real stories of father-son relationships and the great political divide in America today.

Goldberg gives us a mix of eccentric characters, like the father and son Katzenelenbogens, as well as a number of cardboard cutouts in many of the denizens of the titular condo, The Château Sedan Neuve. The elder Katzenelenbogen comes complete with all the baggage loaded into his name: Melsor in homage to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and the October Revolution. Once a famed Russian poet, literary scholar, and political dissident, his son grew up in the shadow of that famous revolutionary, and picked up the revolutionary mantle: “...Bill just had one stance: warrior. To him, many things were akin to fascism. Bring it on, the bigger the better! Onward, Comrades, fight to the last drop of blood, victory will be ours.”

But America did what it does best and turned the senior Katzenelenbogen into a capitalist of the most American kind. He made his fortune with an “ambulette” service and Medicare fraud. Now, Melsor is a hard-core Trump supporter who rails against liberals, Muslims, and political correctness. When Bill asks, “Do you remember fleeing oppression...Do you remember having once been a refugee?” Melsor’s wife responds, “Americans voted for Muslim foreigner. Twice!”

Zbig Wronski’s death from a fall off a forty-third story balcony of the Grand Dux hotel, Melsor’s war with the condo board, and Bill’s investigation serve as metaphors for life in America, where immigrants take a giant leap in coming to a new land in search of a better life. Some never make it, some rise and fall and some, like Melsor Katzenelenbogen (a name that appropriately means cat’s elbows), will always land on their feet.

Like that German surname, translations for foreign words are given throughout the book. Every sentence spoken in Russian, every poem or sign, is first given in that language, followed by a translation in brackets. Perhaps that’s intended to emphasize the stark division in world view, or to remind the reader of the social isolation of émigrés even when they fully embrace “American-ness.” Still, jumping over lines of Russian got old quickly. I think a little bit of that would have been sufficient to make the point.

The translations are worth skimming over for the biting satire, made brilliant by the author’s complete lack of condemnation or condoning of his characters’ actions and choices. He lets them be who they are. Goldberg trusts the reader enough to not interpret or tell them what to think. He leaves the ending both ambiguous and hopeful. Maybe this is all just the mind playing tricks, maybe what we’re seeing was never really there: “It could have been triggered by solar activity, or—and this is highly unlikely in the extreme—it’s [the] mind playing tricks, imagining, lying.”

We can only hope.

Lynne Hinkey uses experiences from her years living in the Caribbean to infuse her novels with a bit of tropical magic, from the siren call of the islands, to the hysteria and humor of the mysterious chupacabra. Visit Lynne at www.lynnehinkey.com

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