Things are complicated further when Mikkel, immoral as he may be, reports a story that exposes a conservative politician as a pedophile. What does this mean for Reuben, who’s developing a view of virtue and manhood derived from his admiration for a man seemingly characterized by his “depravity”? Reuben ruminates on this deeply, even undertaking an audio project in which he purports to interview Mikkel on “cross-cultural ideas of masculinity.”
Decoding Reuben’s (or Lipstein’s) thesis on this topic would take a term paper the likes of which this English major thankfully left behind years ago, but attempting to untangle its threads is part of the fun of the novel: Reuben, like the privileged and morally unmoored men of Lipstein’s previous two novels, “Last Resort” and “The Vegan,” is exhaustingly self-involved, and endlessly self-analyzing. If his revelations sometimes feel a little glib (“the right and the left were just counterweights to each other in the same tired, morally facile system”), Reuben’s plight feels urgent all the same.
The real fun of “Something Rotten,” though, lies in the concentric deceptions that Reuben and Cecilie both uncover and perpetrate. At heart, this is a book about deceit, about double-crossing and discovering the difference between abstract and tangible truth. I’ll not spoil the vertiginous plot turns, but suffice it to say, by the time Reuben declares, “I’m just going to be true to myself,” you’re as convinced that this is as solid a credo for living a virtuous life as you are when Polonius presents the idea to Laertes and tells him to give it a whirl.
The name Reuben means “behold, a son,” and “Something Rotten” asks us to behold many of them, each with a complicated father or father figure of his own. Mikkel is a deadbeat dad of sorts to Jonas and Reuben, but Reuben’s own biological father, absent and unknown, looms large over the proceedings, as do the fathers of Cecilie and her Danish friends.
The jacket of the book depicts a close-up photo of a squalling baby. This could be Reuben and Cecilie’s son, the focus of his parents’ hopes and anxieties. It could be an allusion to Reuben, after Mikkel gets him to shave his head. Or it could be a proxy for any of us, unthinking and needy and crying out over some minor need unmet, blissfully unaware of all the pain and complication to come.
SOMETHING ROTTEN | By Andrew Lipstein | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 340 pp. | $28