An old New York Catskills hotel is converted into a Reeducation center for star #MeToo offenders in a story full of cunning and craft, double meanings and doppelgangers.
A finalist for the Jewish National Book Award strikes again with another brilliant satire — a treat for readers of Philip Roth, Dara Horn, Nathan Englander, and others.
Somewhere in the Catskills there’s a camp called Camp Jeff. The place is named for Jeffrey Epstein, not that Jeffrey Epstein, this is the good Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy benefactor who wants his name on the building, though the bad one’s not entirely irrelevant to this story.
When Manhattan's preeminent writer manqué, Gershon Gordon, receives a thick envelope containing his acceptance to this mysterious program, he’s incredulous. True, his already stagnant career has recently ground to a full stop due to accusations of sexual impropriety, but the disgraced financier is dead, and besides, Gordon hasn’t even applied. Despite his reservations, during a freakish winter heatwave Gordon soon finds himself at this former Borscht Belt hotel in the Catskills, seated among the chosen ten — nine men and one woman — selected as members of the inaugural class of Camp Jeff. He hopes he might at least get a book out of the bizarre program, a luxe experimental therapeutic regimen designed to rehabilitate its campers, all of whom have been laid low by the #MeToo movement.
Tova Reich’s newest novel, on the heels of her award-winning Mother India, is a raucous and biting tale of a reeducation camp for alleged sex offenders. Reich’s verbal blade is sharp and she slashes with it, but not without the sensitivity that such incisiveness requires. Written in Tova Reich’s signature satirical mode, Camp Jeff revels in its brazen indictment of contemporary masculinity, elite arrogance, and therapeutic culture. Her whip-smart dialogue and unsparing pen reveal rather than merely mock: here is a deeply considered work of psychological portraiture and a profound examination of contemporary American culture.
