Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes
T Cooper
Dutton, 2006
“Not one lick is true, though some incidents are true, and others are true, but made up,” states T Cooper, a character who, like his creator of the same name, obsesses over the fluid nature of identity throughout the pages of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes.
This quirky postmodern novel, an exploration of present coping with past pain, is actually two novels in one. Yet. despite the best efforts of both author and character, the two never quite manage to seamlessly merge into a coherent whole.
The first, which takes place in Russia just before the 1902 pogroms, chronicles the arrival of T’s great-grandparents, Esther and Hersh Lipshitz, into the U.S. and their almost immediate misplacing of their abnormally blond and blue-eyed son, Reuven. Cooper manages to take what could be a typical Jewish-family-moves-to-Lower-East-Side tale and transforms it into something darker and stranger.
The remaining Lipshitz five end up relocating to Texas to meet Esther’s brother Avi, setting the stage for an entirely different exploration of the consequences of loss, whether of country, children, or even self.
Esther’s fixation on her brother and lost child, often at the expense of the rest of her family, climaxes when she catches a glimpse of the the famous blond aviator Charles Lindbergh. Convinced that he is her lost son, Esther remains fixated on him until her death, barely acknowledging her living children except to wonder “which of [their own] children would disappear… It was inevitable.” Cooper paints a portrait of an obsession that is by turns heartrending and hilarious; the themes of lost children and misplaced identity, personified in the unsuspecting figure of Lindbergh himself, resonate with any 21st-century reader.
The second story, however, is a bit weaker than the first. This section is narrated by T in New York City of 2002. T, whose gender remains ambiguous even until the novel’s end, copes with this legacy of loss by impersonating Eminem as he DJs Bar Mitzvah parties and ignoring the book he was planning to write. While Cooper’s use of photographs in this section, including one of a model Spirit of St. Louis plane, adds to the authentic feel of the tale he tells, the character of T is too much of an angry cliché to truly serve as a focal point for the story of his family.
Remaining emotionally distant from his wife and pinning most of his hopes and dreams on his idol Eminem, T certainly seems an authentic Lipshitz descendant. Yet, he too often resorts to lines like “I know I can spit an ill rhyme” or “I think women, they hit that age … and they just go fucking Mom-zilla on our asses” to be believed as a three-dimensional character, especially in contrast to his more complex and fully drawn predecessors.
By the end of the novel, the reader is left with more questions than answers. T’s gender, the fate of Reuven, whether T will give in to his wife’s demands to have a child — all of these issues remain unresolved, often lingering only half-formed in the reader’s consciousness. Yet, the disjointed, open-ended feel of both stories remains true to Cooper’s true-to-life exploration of the blurred boundaries between past and present, male and female, despair and redemption. Despite its flaws, Lipshitz Six manages to remain both a poignant and irreverent meditation on identity that takes nothing for granted, as T himself states, “Reviews are not to be trusted. They will always say one thing and do another.”
