Reuven Fenton is the author of the new novel Goyhood. He is also a reporter for the New York Post.
Q: What inspired you to write Goyhood, and how did you create your character Mayer?
A: The short answer is, the idea struck me one day as a “What if?” scenario, which I added to a list of “What if?” scenarios I jot on my phone whenever one comes to me.
What if a BLM activist and a MAGA activist fell in love? What if Groundhog Day were set in New York City? What if an Orthodox Jew cloistered his whole adult life in a yeshiva in Brooklyn discovered he wasn’t actually Jewish?
I imagine lots of people have ideas like this when they let their minds wander.
The longer answer would involve mining my unconscious. My backstory is complicated, but in summary I grew up in a traditional-but-secular Jewish household until, when I was 11 or 12, my parents had a religious awakening of sorts that brought about a swift transformation in our lifestyle. My unwillingness to let go of secularism, even as I embraced Judaism, set up a polarity inside me that exists to this day.
As Mayer’s character took shape over various drafts, he came to embody one side of me, just as his wild-child twin brother David embodies another side of me. Jewish mysticism teaches that everyone has a Godly soul and an animal soul, and I tend to think that Mayer and David represent those two souls.
Goyhood is about how, during a wacky road trip through the Deep South, those two souls, estranged for years, are forced to reconcile while coping with this spiritual crisis of discovering they aren’t actually Jewish.
Q: Can you say more about the dynamic between Mayer and David?
A: Mayer and David were inseparable as children, but then one day Mayer had a religious epiphany that altered the course of both their lives. He enrolled in a yeshiva in Brooklyn, effectively abandoning his brother. David fell into a wild life of recklessness and excess. They stopped speaking.
Fast forward to now: their mother’s death forces a reunion. Her posthumous revelation that they aren’t biologically Jewish forces them to spend substantial time together.
Tension dominates at first because of their conflicting motivations and personalities. But over a series of wild adventures – one nearly getting them killed – boundaries start crumbling as Mayer and David reveal truths about themselves.
Q: The writer Joshua Cohen said of the book, “Nothing is authentic except the quest for the authentic and it's just such a quest that speeds-way-over-the-legal-limit through the pages of Reuven Fenton's remarkably funny and compassionate novel about Goys, Jews, and that most crisis-prone of contemporary identities: the male at middle-age.” What do you think of that description?
A: It’s remarkable that a Pulitzer winner took the time to read my book, let alone formulate in his mind something so profound and original.
I’d have been thrilled if he’d just written a one-word review – “Funny!” Instead he penned a rather profound reflection about the quest for authenticity. I’d never thought about the quest for authenticity, but he did, and that’s what’s so great about art. The consumer often takes away things that the creator himself never thought of.
Cohen’s observation on middle-age is likewise intriguing. I’m three months older than him. We are middle-aged. I created my protagonists as my own age, but only because I could best relate to them that way; I wasn’t conscious about the link between age and identity.
Cohen introduced me to the concept after the fact. And he’s right! My twins are at a sweet spot in life that’s fundamental to making the story work: they’ve got wisdom and instinct and the urgency of knowing time is not on their side, but they’re not so old that they can’t still relate to who they were as children.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: Not only did I not know how it would end – I didn’t know where it was going. All I had at first was my “What if?” concept, and I just rolled with it.
It seemed logical to open the story just before my protagonist suffered his crisis. Then he suffered his crisis – and then I had to figure out the rest of the book.
I didn’t want him going straight home and, say, pantomiming being a Jew for fear his Orthodox community would ostracize him. Such a storyline felt cheap and disingenuous, as I imagine in real life his community would be, if anything, sympathetic to his plight.
No, I thought: let this story take place out in the open, among towns and meadows and mountain foothills, far from stifling Brooklyn. Let’s give Mayer space to come to grips with his fate. And let’s make this book fun. Let’s make it a road trip buddy book, where Mayer’s and David’s comic adventures balance out the weighty questions of faith and identity.
So I tagged along with the brothers, knowing no better than they what trouble lurked ahead. Over a series of drafts, as the brothers’ motivations became clearer, so did the story arc, and I started getting a sense of an ending that would tie everything together.
I decided it would be fun for David to drag Mayer to a spiritual retreat hosted by a Reform rabbi of all things – a woman no less. Talk about a clash of cultures. And she turns out to be the King Solomon of the story.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’ve completed a rickety first draft of a new novel.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I wrote a novel prior to Goyhood, a YA urban fantasy involving a teenage girl who acquires a sort of superpower. This was another one of those “What if?” scenarios that struck me one day, and I ran with it.
Though literary agents liked the concept, ultimately they all declined representation for more or less the same reason: the story started out as a lively teen dramedy, then became a crime-fighting yarn. They all liked the dramedy but not the crime fighting.
I mention this because authors always advise aspiring writers to write the novel you want to read, whether or not it’s a trendy genre.
I learned this lesson the hard way. While drafting the YA novel, I realized fairly early that this was a book I would never read. I’m just not that into YA, and Marvel oversaturation killed my love of superheroes.
But I soldiered on because I believed that with a workingman’s ethic I could write a successful YA series. Not every TV writer loves the series he or she is working on, right?
It turns out there’s a practical reason you should write the novel you want to read: you’re a fan of that genre. You’ve read that genre extensively. You have an intrinsic sense of how it’s done, and that’s crucial because your novel’s got to feel right, and agents and editors know when it doesn’t feel right.
Now, you could theoretically slog through dozens of YA novels in order to educate yourself on the YA craft, and then write one that feels right. But if it’s already so difficult to write a book you would read, why make it all the harder by writing one you wouldn't read?
Goyhood was the book I wanted to read, and writing it – grueling as it was – was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. I’m happy with it. I would read it.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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