Humor links Slater’s first adult novel to his children’s stories

By DEBORAH MOON

article created on: 2009-01-15T00:00:00

“Selfless” is the title of the soon to be published first adult novel by Portland children’s book author David Michael Slater. It incorporates the humorous slant of his children’s books, but on a more sophisticated level.

“Selfless,” due out March 15, is the story of a quirky, apparently anti-religious Jewish family in 1980s Pittsburgh. The hilarious story is told by son Jon, the only member of the family to attend religious school—”so he could have a choice,” says his mother.

No one in the family is quite what they appear, with the possible exception of the grandfather, Leon, a Holocaust survivor who raised his daughter—Jon’s mother— alone. He marries Myna, another survivor, whom he meets when she arrives with her son—Jon’s father—to take his daughter on a blind date. Jon’s parents and grandparents meeting the same night sets the tone for offbeat family dynamics.

The story opens on the eve of what was to have been Jon’s bar mitzvah. The book then goes back to the months leading up to that evening revealing the debacle that curtailed his bar mitzvah.

Chapters of the family’s 1980s life are interspersed with brief reflections by Jon as a young man traveling the world in a relentless search for or escape from his past.

In the family chapters, Jon’s two older sisters seem intent on permanently damaging his psyche. The family’s household wide intercom system is put to frequent use in schemes and eavesdropping escapades.

When the stridently anti-religious father departs for Israel to “research” his next book in an Orthodox community, the family is shaken. After learning that before his departure he had been meeting secretly with a hassidic rabbi confuses them still further.

In all, “Selfless” is a funny, coming-of-age tale that reveals people are often not what they seem.