THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES
By Nathan Englander
Alfred A. Knopf, 339 pages, $25

In one of the most arresting stories in Nathan Englander’s first book, a collection called For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), Charles Morton Luger discovers one afternoon in a taxi cab on Park Avenue that he is the bearer of a Jewish soul.

 “A New York story of the first order,” Mr. Englander writes, “like a woman giving birth in an elevator or a hot-dog vendor performing open-heart surgery with a pocketknife and Bic pen.”

In The Ministry of Special Cases, gone is the familiar contemporary cityscape and its inhabitants, though some of the characters introduced in Mr. Englander’s debut—the despondent Jewish acrobats whose farcical act keeps them alive; the revolutionary writers sentenced to death; the pious husband whose wife’s sexual rejection leads him astray—seem to have morphed into the family at the heart of the novel.

Set in Buenos Aires in 1976, at the outset of Argentina’s Dirty War, The Ministry of Special Cases is the story of Kaddish Poznan, the ambitious but cursed son of a prostitute; his loving wife, Lillian; and Pato, their headstrong son, a university student who reads banned books and whispers of conspiracy theories with his wayward friends.

To make a living, Lillian and Kaddish are forced to confront their own mortality on a daily basis. Outcast Kaddish is paid to chisel away from tombstones the names of prominent Jewish families’ embarrassing relatives (“I’ll tell you what this job is. It is work that needs to be done in a world that runs on shame,” he says), while Lillian works in a life-insurance sales office (“The only thing fire insurance has ever extinguished is a nagging doubt. The house goes up in flames just the same”), serving fattened generals and the like. Money is tight, but in the Poznan family, they love one another and fight one another with gusto. Their means may be meager, but their lives are not.At first, the regime’s oppression is only a distant menace, something Lillian believes a sturdy new door for their rented apartment will secure them from. But when Pato is suddenly arrested by the government, Lillian and Kaddish must descend into the quagmires of senseless bureaucracy—the Ministry of Special Cases—to appeal for their son’s release.

“I work hard!” one ministry official shouts impotently when Lillian and Kaddish come to him. “I’ve earned citations for hardness, for temerity!”

However, the real prize for temerity—if such prizes were awarded—would belong to Kaddish and Lillian, who, in their desperate attempts to find their son, are forced to plumb the depths of their marriage and their community; they are pushed to the edge of their sanity.

Grave-robbing, book-burning in the bathtub and multiple nose jobs (one of them botched) are just a few of the strange adventures of the Poznan family in this beautifully paced and engaging novel.

Nathan Englander bravely wrangles the themes of political liberty and personal loss with the swift style and knowing humor of folklore. In the spirit of the simple ambiguity of its title, The Ministry of Special Cases is carefully contradictory, wise and off-kilter, funny and sad.

Mythili Rao is a book reviewer for Publishers Weekly. She lives in New York.

By the end of Day 1, Max and Elena’s pillow talk has sprawled into a civil yet cacophonous conversation that includes much of their extended clan—all of whom have suddenly decided to camp out at Max’s Hollywood estate. There’s Zoe, Max’s bewitching and crisis-prone actress ex-wife, and her lover Paul, a slow-speaking, bearded yogic charlatan. There’s Max and Zoe’s daughter Isabel, an upright, wildlife-conserving vegan, and Stoney, Max’s ineffectual agent (who has been quietly sleeping with Isabel since she was 16). Also in the mix: good-natured Simon, Elena’s dilettante porn-star son; Charlie, Max’s boyhood pal; Delphine, Zoe’s stern Jamaican mother (who still lives in Max’s mother-in-law suite); and Cassie, Delphine’s best friend.

The flamboyance of this cast of characters and their lifestyle is a departure for Ms. Smiley; her previous protagonists have included dentists, real-estate agents and farmers, people whose banal professional lives mask expansive inner lives. In Ten Days in the Hills, everyone still has secrets, but there’s little space for “secret lives” and no dearth of intimate discussion. Another departure is the prevailing mood of jolly languorousness that hangs over Ten Days in the Hills; in other works, Ms. Smiley sets a more measured and somber tone. But in spite of these forays into new territory, the novel retains Ms. Smiley’s signature appetite for inquiry. “I investigated moral issues with the dedication only someone who is literally and entirely agnostic would do,” Ms. Smiley has said of her prior work, and she’s at it again here.

This time, the moral issue at stake is the war in Iraq—but apart from the nervy Elena, none of the loquacious characters in this dialogue-driven book really wants to talk about it. What they all like discussing—and fittingly, given that The Decameron’s 10 story-tellers spend 10 days swapping 100 stories while the Black Death rages beyond them—is movies: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Women, Pennies from Heaven, Ashes and Diamonds, The Hours, Sunset Boulevard, The Lion King, The Matrix, Badlands, Defending Your Life, Alien, Meet Joe Black, The Magnificent Seven, The Birdcage, A Man and a Woman, Spartacus, The Vikings, The Return of Martin Guerre, Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, Coming Home and Triumph of the Will, to name a few, plus a smattering of colorful films invented by Ms. Smiley.

While there’s some talk for talk’s sake, much of the movie-oriented conversation tends to the pointedly personal or political. It seems that for this Hollywood crowd, things become clearer—or at least more palpable—when filtered through a lens. When Elena gives Max a handheld video camera, it doesn’t take long for him to direct it towards the naked curve of her waist. “When he looked at it with his eyes, it was pleasant but unremarkable,” Ms. Smiley writes. “When he looked through the viewfinder, the same curve was bright and erotic, flat in a way, but alluring.”

Although the novel makes the steady case that a nation’s choices on matters abroad invariably seep into its citizens’ lives at home, Ten Days in the Hills is by no means a straightforward political polemic. Ms. Smiley seems keenly aware of the difficulty of attributing an individual’s particular rise in temperature to a frightening change in national climate rather than a purely personal fever. “‘The United States’ is an abstraction about how to accommodate diversity and unity at the same time,” Elena says. “When one faction seizes power and ignores everyone else and just adopts a try-and-stop-me sort of attitude, then the whole system is put at risk. I don’t see how they don’t understand that.” Is her exasperation a calibrated expression of moral indignation, or a stubborn expression of self? It’s hard to judge. At one point, troubled by his lover’s diatribes, Max blurts out, “What were you like during the Clinton administration?”

But there are no real flashbacks to the Clinton—or any other—administration. There’s only what is said and what (or more importantly, among this uninhibited and lascivious bunch, who) is done during these 10 days in the hills. Sexual acts are strewn through the book with deliberate extravagance; as Ms. Smiley told the Vanderbilt Register last month, “Like The Decameron, I knew my novel was going to be erotica. I knew it was going to be fun, and it was fun.”

After Day 4, the scene grows increasingly entropic. There are Newman-O’s and artichoke bisque, unexpected seductions and betrayals, a violent punch delivered in the kitchen and a proposed adaptation of Taras Bulba (Gogol’s novella about “stirred-up” Cossacks). On Day 7, the party relocates, but the show goes on. Ms. Smiley revels in the task she has set for herself. “The conversation was very pleasant and yet was unbelievable,” Elena observes at one point. “Its very pleasure seemed to hint at the fact that elsewhere or everywhere else, the vast and the horrible loomed.”

In Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), Ms. Smiley writes candidly of career anxieties. “I wondered if novel-writing had its own natural lifespan and without knowing it I had outlived the lifespan of my novel-writing career,” she says of her post-9/11 bout of writer’s block. Ten Days in the Hills is a sturdy counterargument to such worries. According to Max’s agent Stoney, the trouble with My Lovemaking with Elena is that “It has every single thing that Hollywood producers hate and despise and that American audiences hate and despise—fornication, old people, current events, and conversation.” These are precisely the things that predominate in Ten Days in the Hills—but Jane Smiley, with her probing talent, transforms them into rare assets.

Mythili Rao is a freelance television and print journalist living in New York.

Many of the stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are structured around a character’s lucid recollection of a strange or vivid incident from his or her past. A young man thinks back on the bizarre daydreams of a hospitalized classmate in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”; a girl remembers a mysterious run-in with a restaurant owner on her 20th birthday in “Birthday Girl”; a young man recalls a haunting night spent as a watchman in “The Mirror”; the narrator’s polyamorous friend tells of a 40-day spell when he was visited by daily vomiting and punctual prank phone calls in “Nausea 1979.” A story called “A Folklore for My Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism” is about the unexpected adult confessions of one man’s boyhood all-star classmate, and “The Seventh Man” is about another storyteller’s childhood brush with a typhoon. In each case the notable episode defies explanation, and the reader is led to believe that it’s precisely the lack of resolution that has spurred the retelling.

Paired with scattered references to the meaning of storytelling, the repeated narrative device of framing a story within a story also lends the collection as a whole a mood of literary/philosophical inquiry. “The Mirror” begins: “All the stories you’ve been telling tonight seem to fall into two categories,” and the opening of “The Seventh Man” announces that the speaker was “the last one to tell his story that night.” The opening paragraphs of “The Year of Spaghetti” include the explanatory line, “This is a story from the Year of Spaghetti, 1971 A.D.,” and near the end of “Nausea 1979,” the storyteller tells the narrator, “I guess that’s why you’re a writer and I’m not.” In a particularly flagrant display of writerly self-consciousness, “Chance Traveler” opens: “The ‘I’ here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of the story.” Mr. Murakami wisely uses these touches of metafictional speculation only sparingly; he trusts that the utter originality of his stories itself is enough to hold his readers.

And, as usual, it does. Mr. Murakami possesses a unique talent for fusing stark realism with unfettered imaginings. In this passage, from in “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story,” a man waits for his lover to give him an answer: “With her back to me, she allowed her slender fingers to trail in the water. It seemed as if my question were coursing through her fingers to be conducted to the ruined city beneath the water. It’s still down there, I’m sure, the question mark glittering at the bottom of the pond like a polished metal fragment. For all I know, it’s showering the cola cans around it with that same question.”

If Mr. Murakami’s novels tend towards somber reflections on mortality and the tragedy of life’s inherent uncontrollability, in his short stories, it’s more often a bittersweet zest for life—here, life at its most fantastic, unpredictable and otherworldly—that triumphs. Sections from “Man-Eating Cats,” for instance, reveal a softer and more whimsical version of passages from Sputnik Sweetheart (2001). In the novel, we get an exchange between a young woman and young man caught in a love triangle: The young man lusts after the young woman, who’s in the grip of an urgent, unrequited love for an older women. These thwarted passions give a newspaper account of the man-eating cats found in a dead woman’s apartment a dark absurdity. In the story, the same anecdote is shared between vacationing lovers, and the whole episode takes on a fresh levity.

“A Shinagawa Monkey” is another story that manages to tackle serious themes in a light-hearted way. The story opens with a young married woman noticing that “recently she’d had trouble remembering her own name.” Unable to find an explanation for these mysterious lapses of memory, and dissatisfied with the temporary solution of engraving her name on a charm bracelet, Mizuki Ando seeks the help of a tiny counseling center, which after several sessions tracks down a mischievous Shinagawa monkey lurking in sewers, waiting for the opportunity to snatch away names.

“I’m a monkey who takes people’s names,” the Shinagawa monkey tells Mizuki. “It’s a sickness I suffer from. Once I spot a name I can’t help myself.” The encounter proves profoundly life-changing: The monkey is able to tell Mizuki the things that have “stuck” to her name, and the truth is nothing short of devastating. “Your mother doesn’t love you. She’s never loved you,” says the Shinagawa monkey, and “you don’t truly love your husband.” That the entire episode manages to be both genuinely cathartic and delightfully fanciful is a testament to Mr. Murakami’s gift as a storyteller.

For Mr. Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the product of insuppressible and spontaneous—as opposed to more deliberate, disciplined—expression. Some of the stories in this collection were written in the early 1980’s, but most of them date from 2005, when Mr. Murakami, inspired by a “powerful urge,” went on a story-writing binge: He wrote five in about a month, then churned out several more. Perhaps the strength of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (which recently won the $45,000 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award) ultimately derives from the fact that Haruki Murakami, as he notes in his introduction, finds “writing novels a challenge [and] writing short stories a joy.” As the Shinagawa monkey says of his own vocation, “It’s what I do.”

Mythili Rao is a graduate student in English and American literature at N.Y.U. and a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

Many of the stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are structured around a character’s lucid recollection of a strange or vivid incident from his or her past. A young man thinks back on the bizarre daydreams of a hospitalized classmate in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”; a girl remembers a mysterious run-in with a restaurant owner on her 20th birthday in “Birthday Girl”; a young man recalls a haunting night spent as a watchman in “The Mirror”; the narrator’s polyamorous friend tells of a 40-day spell when he was visited by daily vomiting and punctual prank phone calls in “Nausea 1979.” A story called “A Folklore for My Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism” is about the unexpected adult confessions of one man’s boyhood all-star classmate, and “The Seventh Man” is about another storyteller’s childhood brush with a typhoon. In each case the notable episode defies explanation, and the reader is led to believe that it’s precisely the lack of resolution that has spurred the retelling.

Paired with scattered references to the meaning of storytelling, the repeated narrative device of framing a story within a story also lends the collection as a whole a mood of literary/philosophical inquiry. “The Mirror” begins: “All the stories you’ve been telling tonight seem to fall into two categories,” and the opening of “The Seventh Man” announces that the speaker was “the last one to tell his story that night.” The opening paragraphs of “The Year of Spaghetti” include the explanatory line, “This is a story from the Year of Spaghetti, 1971 A.D.,” and near the end of “Nausea 1979,” the storyteller tells the narrator, “I guess that’s why you’re a writer and I’m not.” In a particularly flagrant display of writerly self-consciousness, “Chance Traveler” opens: “The ‘I’ here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of the story.” Mr. Murakami wisely uses these touches of metafictional speculation only sparingly; he trusts that the utter originality of his stories itself is enough to hold his readers.

And, as usual, it does. Mr. Murakami possesses a unique talent for fusing stark realism with unfettered imaginings. In this passage, from in “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story,” a man waits for his lover to give him an answer: “With her back to me, she allowed her slender fingers to trail in the water. It seemed as if my question were coursing through her fingers to be conducted to the ruined city beneath the water. It’s still down there, I’m sure, the question mark glittering at the bottom of the pond like a polished metal fragment. For all I know, it’s showering the cola cans around it with that same question.”

If Mr. Murakami’s novels tend towards somber reflections on mortality and the tragedy of life’s inherent uncontrollability, in his short stories, it’s more often a bittersweet zest for life—here, life at its most fantastic, unpredictable and otherworldly—that triumphs. Sections from “Man-Eating Cats,” for instance, reveal a softer and more whimsical version of passages from Sputnik Sweetheart (2001). In the novel, we get an exchange between a young woman and young man caught in a love triangle: The young man lusts after the young woman, who’s in the grip of an urgent, unrequited love for an older women. These thwarted passions give a newspaper account of the man-eating cats found in a dead woman’s apartment a dark absurdity. In the story, the same anecdote is shared between vacationing lovers, and the whole episode takes on a fresh levity.

“A Shinagawa Monkey” is another story that manages to tackle serious themes in a light-hearted way. The story opens with a young married woman noticing that “recently she’d had trouble remembering her own name.” Unable to find an explanation for these mysterious lapses of memory, and dissatisfied with the temporary solution of engraving her name on a charm bracelet, Mizuki Ando seeks the help of a tiny counseling center, which after several sessions tracks down a mischievous Shinagawa monkey lurking in sewers, waiting for the opportunity to snatch away names.

“I’m a monkey who takes people’s names,” the Shinagawa monkey tells Mizuki. “It’s a sickness I suffer from. Once I spot a name I can’t help myself.” The encounter proves profoundly life-changing: The monkey is able to tell Mizuki the things that have “stuck” to her name, and the truth is nothing short of devastating. “Your mother doesn’t love you. She’s never loved you,” says the Shinagawa monkey, and “you don’t truly love your husband.” That the entire episode manages to be both genuinely cathartic and delightfully fanciful is a testament to Mr. Murakami’s gift as a storyteller.

For Mr. Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the product of insuppressible and spontaneous—as opposed to more deliberate, disciplined—expression. Some of the stories in this collection were written in the early 1980’s, but most of them date from 2005, when Mr. Murakami, inspired by a “powerful urge,” went on a story-writing binge: He wrote five in about a month, then churned out several more. Perhaps the strength of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (which recently won the $45,000 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award) ultimately derives from the fact that Haruki Murakami, as he notes in his introduction, finds “writing novels a challenge [and] writing short stories a joy.” As the Shinagawa monkey says of his own vocation, “It’s what I do.”

Mythili Rao is a graduate student in English and American literature at N.Y.U. and a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.