Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni

If an author were to reverse-engineer a book especially for me, it would probably be a hybrid novel set in New York, in the Jewish community of the Lower East Side, and probably around the turn of the last century, but about historically-rooted monsters.  This book, of course does not exist, since it is an absurd setup for a novel.  Or rather, it didn't, until a few months ago, when Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni was published.  I got a copy right away, and bumped it to the top of my queue.

Perhaps I was therefore overly excited, anticipating too much.  It is good.  It has flashes of rich insight.  But somehow, it lacks teeth.  The main characters are a female golem -- a clay creature animated by a corrupt Jewish mystic -- and a male jinni, a shapeshifting spirit of fire from the deserts of Syria.  The golem is dubbed "Chava," created to serve as a faithful wife to a man who animates her and then dies shortly thereafter on the transatlantic to New York.  Created to serve him and anticipate his every need, she is now masterless, and her ability to sense the needs and desires is therefore rootless.  She becomes overwhelmed by the desperate needs of those all around her, first on the crammed and cramped ship and then in the Jewish neighborhoods of lower Manhattan.  The jinni is a fiery character, impulsive and somewhat reckless.  Nicknamed "Ahmad," he was trapped in human form by a shady Arab mystic, and then -- as in most jinni narratives, trapped in a lamp.  He is accidentally released by a metalsmith living in Little Syria, a smaller community not far from the Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side.

We follow their trials and tribulations separately until, eventually and inevitably, they have a chance meeting.  They recognize one another's inhumanity, and fall into an unlikely odd-couple relationship, fraught with friction based on their inherent differences.  They need each other, though, if only to have someone with which they can each be what they are.

The two "monsters" are both pretty human from the start, and that might be some of the trouble I had with the novel.  They each say several times how hard it is for them to understand humans, but, take away their special powers and they both basically are human.  The troll in Kerstin Ekman's Forest of Hours, for example, really doesn't understand humans, or himself for that matter.  The scene in which he cuts off his little finger, expecting it to grow back like a tree's branch, has stuck with me as a compelling example of his failure to grasp what he is, and what the humans around him are.  He doesn't understand why they are so horrified.  The jinni is a playboy who doesn't understand why humans take sexual relations so seriously, but that confusion hardly requires one to be an air elemental.

The novel picks up the pace well in its last quarter, and is, all throughout, an enjoyable read.  It just should have been great, fabulous, perfect (at least for me).  Ah, well.  Surely there will be another Lower-East-Side-Historical-Monster novel published soon...