Bad Animals by Joel Yanofsky Page A

negatives cancel each other out? Does this mean he likes school? Or he doesn’t? There are also arcane facts written down about animals I have never heard of before and I’m not sure exist; who knew, for instance, that the capybara is the largest rodent in the world? Or that the gharial, a crocodile native to India, is the longest-living of all crocodilians? Thanks to Jonah, I know.
    It shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that my son’s writing requires decoding. All writing does. I’m a literary critic, after all—well, a book reviewer—and I should know this. So I read Jonah’s stories critically, the same way I would read Philip Roth’s latest Zuckerman novel, let’s say, with foreknowledge of Roth’s obsessions, but also on the lookout for a new thread, some new entry point into the mind of the author. In a way, this is hardly a new job for me. It’s just never been essential before.

FIVE
Trouble Came
    â€œThe Book of Job is the only book,” the late Stanley Elkin once said and proved repeatedly in his own writing. “I would never write about someone,” he also said, “who was not at the end of his rope.” Elkin understood what it meant to be hanging by a thread. He lived most of his adult life with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, and his work, while always brashly, blackly funny was imbued with his awareness of the raw deal he’d been handed. In his most Book of Job-like work, The Living End, Elkin s hero, a good but otherwise unremarkable man named Ellerbee, dies, goes to hell, and can’t figure out why. It’s the question always at play in Elkin. Why me? So when Ellerbee is offered the chance to confront God, face to face, so to speak, he passionately pleads his case. He was a good man, seriously good. He never stole or bore false witness. “‘Where were You when I picked up checks and popped for drinks all round? When I shelled out for charity and voted Yes on the bond issues?’” Ellerbee lobbies God.
    The Almighty, being all mighty, has His own explanation for why things have gone so badly for His faithful servant, though it tends to make matters worse. God runs down a long list of Ellerbee’s offences—like the time he opened his liquor store on the Sabbath; the time he said goddamn; the time he admired his neighbour’s wife. “‘You had a big boner,’” God reminds him. And there’s more: “‘You went dancing. You wore zippers in your pants and drove automobiles. You smoked cigarettes and sold the demon rum.’” Ellerbee can’t believe what he’s hearing. This is God’s cosmic explanation: a list of petty grievances, a sum total of nothing much. Here you have it: God’s renowned and so-called mysterious ways.
    I first read The Book of Job in earnest when I was twenty-one, not long after my mother died. At the time, I considered it research for a short story I was trying to write. That’s what I told myself anyway— research. Really, I was looking, like Ellerbee and Elkin, for an explanation. My mother’s death blindsided me. A year later, my reaction to my father’s death couldn’t have been more different. I was prepared for it. And I have been prepared for every bad thing that’s happened in my life ever since: break-ups, betrayals, rejections, lost opportunities. Until Jonah’s diagnosis: with that, I was blindsided all over again.
    Of course, what keeps drawing me back to The Book of Job is not very different from what draws me to most literature—the central character. Job is my kind of hero, after all—passive-aggressive. He takes everything God can dish out—the devastation of his livestock and servants and children, not to mention his complexion, boils head to toe—with what appears to be heroic equanimity. Patience is the adjective so often ascribed to him. Read between the lines, though, and what