His Own Tailor-Made Chronicle
“Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation,” wrote the French philologist Ernest Renan in 1882. One would have thought history is about remembering, but it’s thanks to Renan and his disciple Benedict Anderson that nations are today widely understood to be “imagined” into being. And as every novelist knows, fiction is an art of selection—the legerdemain of leaving things out.
None of this is news to Ruben Blum, the unassuming professor and bumbling father at the center of Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus. Chatty, Jewish, and “an historian” (though not “an historian of the Jews”), he considers himself to be above the fictionalization in which both nationalists and novelists indulge. “I’d like to think my profession has made me more attuned than most,” he assures the reader, “to the selective use of facts and the way that each age and ideological movement manages to cobble together its own tailormade chronicles.” The announcement arrives both as a Renanian echo and as an immediate cue for narrator unreliability: The shared origins of fiction and history, and the dangers therein, are in large part what this very funny, very serious novel—based on true events—is about.
American literary fiction of the past five years could be divided, broadly speaking, into two main categories: realist, seemingly autobiographical fiction set in the present day (novels by Ben Lerner and Jenny Offill; Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You; Brandon Taylor’s Real Life) and prizewinning historical fiction (Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016, 2017, and 2020, respectively). A smaller category of acclaimed novels is set in a dystopic near-future (Ling Ma’s Severance; Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible). The logic of Donald Trump’s presidency suffused many of these books, lending an atmosphere of crisis.
Published five months after Trump’s ousting, , set in the 1950s, marks
