Zinsky the Obscure

by Ilan Mochari

Overview

Thirty-year-old Manhattan bachelor Ariel Zinsky is still recovering from his abusive childhood when he realizes no one -- including his few living relatives -- is truly interested in his narrative. While they numb themselves with the latest celebrity rehab story or the third-world atrocities replayed without ceasing on cable news, he sets out to write his autobiography as an exercise in his own self-medication, recasting himself as the hero in a coming-of-age story. Fans of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES and THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER will relate to this tale of overcoming your childhood's traumas, and the world's indifference to them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937677114
Publisher:	Fomite
Publication date:	04/15/2013
Pages:	362
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Ilan Mochari's short stories have appeared in KEYHOLE, STYMIE, OYSTERS & CHOCOLATE, and RUTHIE'S CLUB. Another short story was a finalist in a GLIMMER TRAIN competition. He is a contributor to COGNOSCENTI, the online magazine for Boston's NPR news station. He has a B.A. in English from Yale. He used it to wait tables for nine years at various restaurants in the Boston area.

Editorial Reviews

This eloquent novel from Mochari probes an angry young man's struggles with identity and emotional stability after an abusive childhood. When 30-year-old New Yorker Ariel Zinsky isn't indulging in marijuana, spectator sports, and masturbation, he thinks of writing his memoir. Marriage and fatherhood are his two big taboos, prisms through which he rationalizes his anti-social behavior. His crude father Robert, a software executive, abused Ariel and his passive mother Barbara, a high-school teacher, for years. After his parents divorce, Ariel turns to his mother for a "true best friend" before leaving home for the University of Michigan. Meanwhile Barbara dates and eventually marries Neil, a Manhattan real estate lawyer, and Ariel gains a loyal confidante in step-sister Nicole. At college, Ariel slaves away to make an NFL draft guide lucrative, wrecks his first relationship with jealousy, and almost drowns his cancer-ridden father. His next two attempts at relationships, first with a well-grounded Harvard student and later with an older lawyer, also fail, stemming from Ariel's intractable unwillingness to commit. By the age of 30, the unlikable Zinsky has built himself a shallow, sterile existence with little prospects of future joy. Mochari's debut novel is both bleak and affecting. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A literary bildungsroman. Mochari's debut chronicles the life of Ariel Zinsky who at the age of 30 has become something of a bitter misanthrope. Zinsky decides to chronicle his life so far with the goal of elucidating how it is he has become a man whose life is almost devoid of social interactions. He goes back to some of his earliest memories beginning with the beatings he received from his estranged father. In Zinsky's first person narration he describes his awkward, social misfit high school years, which are followed by his social misfit college years. However, once he sets out to focus on making a living publishing a guide to the annual NFL draft, a change begins to occur in his life. Zinsky begins to make friends at school, becomes more athletic and experiences his first sexual relationship. Post-college his devotion to his annual guide, which is slowly building a following leads him to quit his office job and instead work as a waiter, but it is also the guide which leads to his first real girlfriend. Although there are some rough times, Zinsky eventually reaches the point where his football side business has become a huge financial success. Sill, Zinsky's old doubts and insecurities poison his personal relationships and bring him to the point where he runs away to Manhattan selling his football empire for a tidy sum so that he can take a low pressure gig at a football magazine. Thanks in part to his English teacher mother, Zinsky is well-read, and Mochari makes use of this fact in crafting a highly readable literary novel. Even when describing the most mundane of scenes Zinsky speaks like a Fitzgerald narrator, "I had cannily obtained many usernames and passwords from the IT department". Though the novel is filled with many such mundane details, it flows well thanks in part to Mochari's clear but colorful prose. Zinsky's rough childhood makes him an underdog and a sympathetic narrator whose story is compelling. Even as he grows into a self-absorbed young man, the reader is still rooting for him though the advantage of another perspective means that the reader can see the error in Zinksy's ways. By novel's end Zinsky has gone from hero to antihero leaving readers with a sense of closure if not exactly a sense of satisfaction with the conclusion. A powerful debut with Dickensian touches in its heartbreaking and occasionally humorous chronicle of the life of a modern young man.

Kirkus Reviews

This wry debut novel takes on the classic coming-of-age saga, and it makes the reader rethink common assumptions about how young people get from here to there.

Booklist - Hazel Rochman

A powerful debut with Dickensian touches in its heartbreaking and occasionally humorous chronicle of the life of a modern young man.

Kirkus - Kirkus Reviews