Mosaic Man

In Mosaic Man, Ronald Sukenick turns his innovative style to the roots of Western and Jewish tradition. Using the form of the Old Testament as a contemporary Jewish epic, Sukenick reinvents the Jewish novel in the context as Pop culture, and repositions it on the cutting edge of millennial America. You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy Mosaic Man, you just have to like comics, movies and TV. In a book that has already received praise as a major work, Sukenick, one of the old masters of Postmodern fiction, here draws on traditional Jewish narratives such as the Golem story, and presents a vast scope of post-holocaust experience, moving from New York to Paris to Poland to Italy to Jerusalem. Spanning a range from rough sex to quasi-theological speculations, from moral injunction to liberating autobiographical candor, the book is a mosaic of stories making the case that in our new electronic universe the parts are the whole. The experience of a kid in Brooklyn, of an old writer in Venice, of a mystical tourist in Israel, all become part of a patchwork identity in quest of a moral culture. In this sometimes dark, but always funny, novel, Sukenick continues his lifelong preoccupation with arriving at contemporary truth through fiction.

"To paraphrase an old rye bread ad, you don't have to be Jewish or postmodern to love Mosaic Man."

-Library Journal

"For three decades, Ron Sukenick's fiction has been essential reading for anyone who cares about serious (not somber) fiction in America, and Mosaic Man may be his magnum opus."

-Russell Banks