Arts Entertainment Books To Get Away With Pink Slip by Rita Ciresi (Delacorte Press; 353 pp. ; $22.95) Messiah by Andrei Codrescu (Simon c Schuster; 366 pp.; $25.00) As 1999 winds down to the turn of the millennium, we meet Felicity Le Jeune, an aimless twentysomething with a private investigator's license and a lot of body piercing who has spent every day of her life in New Orleans. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Andrea, a teenaged Sarajevan refugee, stumbles into a Jerusalem convent and captivates the visitors there with her beauty and spiritual aura. Felicity is compulsively honest; Andrea lies as naturally as breathing. Felicity's life is all too orderly; Andrea creates chaos wherever she goes. Is one of these two women — or both together — the Messiah? Or, how about Vanna White? Andrei Codrescu, best known for his NPR essays and the documentary Road Scholar (he's also published some 20 books during the past quarter-century), has written a satisfying, layered novel, a smorgasbord of the sacred and profane. It's rollicking good fun — with enough skin, sex, bright colors and descrip- tions of food for entertainment on the sensory level --- but with sufficient discus- sion of comparative religion and world's end to provide food for thought. Some of Codrescu's targets are obvious — the villain is a television evangelist — but most of the time his vision is not only imaginative but also wholly origi- nal. In the world Codrescu envisions a mere few months from now, the TV show Wheel of Fortune has a wildly popular counterpart in every nation, and every lan- guage, and is presented as a metaphor for- humankind's fate. Meanwhile, heaven has become a democracy, with the angels — who are also the great minds of history — voting on whether to inhabit human bodies or remain points of light. Throughout the novel, damp, fetid, chaotic New Orleans is spread out before the reader as America's most repellent and seductive city, a sweaty old hooker of a town that still has warmth in its embrace. It presents the apocalypse and it pre- sents hope springing eternal, and so does Andrei Codrescu's story, leaving us per- haps a little wiser but not without optimism. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • — Reviewed by Ellen Jaffe-Gill • 6/25 1999 78 Detroit Jewish News It is 1985, and 25-year-old Lisa Diodetto, after paying her dues in a low-level publishing job and a rat- infested apartment, has landed a rela- tively cushy job editing press releases and brochures for a giant pharmaceu- tical company. Now she's working and living in the 'burbs, making decent money and looking for Mr. Right. Her boss, Eben Strauss, nice-looking but very tightly wrapped, couldn't be "the guy' — could he? Pink Slip takes us through the ups and downs of the romance between Lisa and Strauss, a classic mismatch, if ever there was one. Lisa is the feisty product of New Haven's Italian ghetto, her working-class instincts tempered by a Sarah Lawrence edu- cation and the influence of her sophisticated gay cousin, Dodie. Strauss is the son of a Treblinka sur- vivor, sweet in his way, but fearful and controlling. Ciresi's first novel, Blue Italian, also was about a young Italian woman who falls in love with and marries a Jewish man. Pink. Slip is a much bet- ter book, if only because it takes an interest in characters other than the protagonist. I wasn't convinced by the central relationship of the story; no matter how much Lisa wants to settle down, Strauss is much too stodgy to keep her interested for the long haul. But the friendship between Lisa and her cousin, who is her real soul mate, rings absolutely true. Ciresi also does a great job of cap- turing the particular kind of to AIDS created in the mid-'8 there were no therapies and we know enough about the disease confident in any sort of intima tact, even the non-sexual kind. Ciresi evades the issue of in i child rearing in Blue Italian an Slip, and it could have been an in each novel, since both prota feel an ongoing attachment toe Catholicism and seek some of solace from the Church. But Pink Slip isn't a novel tackle thorny societal problem beach book, pure and simple - Rainer Dart, author of Beaches been Italian, she would have v ■ it designed for readers whe to laugh a little, cry a little the end. — an — Reviewed by Ellen Dreamland by Kevin Baker Collins; 519pp.; $2600) - Immigrants arriving in tur century New York scanned th harbor anticipating the ful their hopes and dreams. Not them would have imagined t fantastic lights emanating fro shore's Coney Island carnival the garish, cutthroat new wor they were about to enter. In Dreamland, Kevin Bakei novel, our guide into the lou impoverished streets of the c and Coney Island is Trick the an entertainer with the carni sometimes dresses as a young mask the deformity that bran unacceptable in the outside w Here in the midst of the (real;