The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

Overview

A biting, tragicomic fable for our neurotic times, The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates conquers Tolstoy’s adage that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Is there any father worse than Abraham?

Are there any unhappier families than the first family of Genesis?

In the follow-up to his acclaimed debut, The Bend of the World, Jacob Bacharach enlivens these existential questions in a madcap tale that replaces the biblical Ur with New York City, the land of Canaan with the rust-belt river valleys of western Pennsylvania. Told in a comic voice that Sam Lipsyte once called "shrewd, deadpan, and dirty," The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates hilariously transposes the biblical story of our first patriarchs into a modern world even madder than the ancient Middle East.

Fleeing from a failed relationship, Isabel Giordani leaves Manhattan for Pittsburgh to accept a job at the underachieving nonprofit Future Cities Institute and insinuates herself into the aimless lives of Isaac Mayer and his father, Abbie. An architect turned crooked real estate developer, Abbie claims to be chasing after an unexpected heavenly vision—one that inevitably embroils the Mayer family within the political and familial machinations of Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Bacharach explores the perpetually fraught themes of love, family, God, and real estate in an irreverent and unnervingly tender tale that Edan Lepucki celebrates as "simultaneously funny and tragic, sacred and profane…wise and clever from the first page to the last."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631491757
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jacob Bacharach is the author of The Bend of the World and The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates. His writing has appeared in the New Republic and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

…the question at the heart of this story is a serious one: Modern-day prophets, how are we to see them? Must they be sane? Must they be upstanding in their own lives? Or can they be mad, crooked, hubristic liars, unfaithful husbands, self-absorbed and inattentive parents and still bear urgent messages we'd do well to heed?…One of Bacharach's more playful tendencies [is] good old-fashioned plot twists. His greater strength, though, is his energetic prose, sure-footed and boldly effervescent…the author's ear for the sidesplitting verbal tics of his quirky and deliciously offbeat characters makes this book well worth the read.

The New York Times Book Review - Shulem Deen

01/23/2017
It’s the 1980s and, while in synagogue, New York architect Abbie Mayer hears the voice of God speaking to him, which causes him to pack up and move to Pittsburgh. Or maybe the move is really engendered by the fact that Abbie got his mistress pregnant and is seeking a fresh start with his wife, Sarah. Motivations such as these are muddled in a novel that is shot through with vagueness. In Pittsburgh, Abbie becomes involved in a land grab scheme with his sister, Veronica. Some time later, 38-year-old Isabel moves to Pittsburgh to escape a failed relationship and meets Abbie’s gay son, Isaac. As Isabel insinuates herself into the lives of Abbie and his family, past and present collide, but no plot detail is ever really clear. The novel takes incisively limned characters and sharp insights into civic corruption and embeds them in what is supposed to be a contemporary retelling of the biblical story of Abraham, patriarch of the Jews. But it’s really just a strained account of real estate shenanigans gone wrong, adding up to little. Of course, Bacharach (The Bend of the World) furthers the biblical allusions by including a scene where Abbie goes after Isaac with a knife, but in the end, the only sacrifice made here is the reader’s time spent on this frustratingly incoherent novel. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Shot through with brutal, crystalline sentences…Bacharach’s combination of intellectual heft, biting wit, and lyrical intensity—his ability to both analyze our world and beautifully satirize it—is unmatched."

Kerry Howley

"The question at the heart of this story is a serious one: Modern-day prophets, how are we to see them? Must they be sane? Must they be upstanding in their own lives? Or can they be mad, crooked, hubristic liars, unfaithful husbands, self-absorbed and inattentive parents and still bear urgent messages we do well to heed? . . . . [Bacharach’s] energetic prose [is] sure-footed and boldly effervescent. . . . The author’s ear for the sidesplitting verbal tics of his quirky and deliciously offbeat characters makes this book well worth the read."

Shulem Deen

"Brilliantly recasts an ancient story for our weird, troubled (but beautiful) times…Jacob Bacharach is a true original."

Edan Lepucki

2016-12-19
A satirical modern take on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.As unfair as it may seem to use a writer's own self-deprecating words against him, it's hard to forget, once you've read the acknowledgements page of Bacharach's (The Bend of the World, 2014) novel, the author's admission that his agent, after reading the first draft, told him "in the nicest possible way that it didn't make any goddamn sense." Perhaps the final version is an improvement over that initial assay, but unfortunately, the book still doesn't make much sense. Bacharach's biblically inspired tale weaves together two stories, toggling somewhat confusingly among the late 1980s (or early '90s), the present day, and various times in between. Abbie Mayer, a New York-based architect of some environmentally forward-thinking renown, who, either because he has impregnated his mistress (and been caught by his wife, Sarah) and has been inspired (while attending synagogue) by a religious vision of a deer on a hilltop or simply because he needs to make a fast buck (no pun intended), moves to Pittsburgh and begins to consult for his lesbian sister's real estate business. Sometime closer to the present day, a young woman named Isabel makes her own move from New York to Pittsburgh to work at a nonprofit called the Future Cities Institute, through which she meets Abbie and Sarah's son, Isaac, and eventually becomes intertwined with the family, although we are left to guess at a few essential details. One of the book's key faults is that the author takes great pains to explain some plot points (the details of a soured deal among Abbie, his sister, and their business partners are spelled out in a nearly 40-page-long arbitration-hearing transcript yet nevertheless remain difficult to grasp) and leaves others unexplained altogether (the progress of Isabel's relationship with her love interest is especially sketchy). What's more, characters and motives often don't ring true, and Bacharach often seems to sacrifice conciseness and clarity for the sake of cleverness. To be fair, the book contains a few interesting story ingredients, but they seem ill-measured and lazily mixed and, like a haphazardly made cake, never seem to quite set. Bacharach's book is admirable in its aspirations but fails to deliver on most of them.

Kirkus Reviews