A romantic comedy written with the authenticity of a memoir,
Jacob''s Ladder is entertaining and intelligent. Full of
wit, slapstick and heart, it conjures up the great screwball
comedies of the 1940s. Joel Yanofsky writes about a community he
knows intimately -- anglophone Montréal -- a community which has,
over the years, both changed dramatically and dramatically resisted
change.
The same is true of Yanofsky''s narrator, Jacob Glassman, a
thirtysomething Oliver Twist stuck in the suburban home he grew up
in and clinging to the status quo for dear life. Not easy to do for
a man who is pursuing two women at the same time and who is caught
up in a shifting series of love triangles. When it comes to
craziness, Jacob points out, there''s an awfully wide margin for
error. In Jacob''s Ladder, that margin is stretched to the
limit by a cast of hilarious, haywire characters: rogue real estate
agents, sentimental adulterers, an obese shrink, an agoraphobic
travel agent, a transsexual newspaper editor, and a proselytzing
rabbinical student with his sights set on Jacob''s bewildered
soul.
`Our protagonist here is Jacob, an anglophone Montrealer
immersed in a complicated loneliness of the soul. He is surrounded
by empty friendships, unrequited passions, undue antagonisms, and
even a fatal attraction. There is deft observation and much
emotion. This may all sound excessively cluttered, but Yanofsky''s
prose is capable of handling the action.''
