To me, 'The End of the Jews' - both the title and the novel itself - is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The problem is Jewish-American fiction that always ends with assimilation back into the community.
'The End of Men' was an incendiary title, but the actual book was very sympathetic to men. It was very invested in a lot of the challenges men are facing with unemployment and the economy changing because of technology.
At one point I would read nothing that was not by the great American Jews - Saul Bellow, Philip Roth - which had a disastrous effect of making me think I needed to write the next great Jewish American novel. As a ginger-haired child in the West of Ireland, that didn't work out very well, as you can imagine.
But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends.
The book doesn't end when you finish writing it.
I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.
I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can't imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade.
It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.