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BOOK REVIEW :
The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green - By Joshua Braff

In his first novel, Joshua Braff has chosen to examine one of the world’s more uncomfortable of subjects – especially for those who have lived through it - male adolescence.

Meet Jacob Green: a Jewish boy in his early teens living a seemingly picturesque life on the East Coast in the early 1980s. He is the product of a militantly Jewish father and a not-so-converted Protestant mother – the second oldest of four children, the younger whom he is indifferent about, the older whom he adores.

It is on this background that Braff tackles the issues that normally plague a young person struggling with the sudden responsibility of growing up – self-esteem, parents, religion, sex – and creates a character who is both sympathetic and entirely relatable.

Braff lets Jacob tell the story. Most of the book is carried by simple narrative, but for a period of the storyline when Jacob is supposed to be writing thank-you notes for his bar-mitzvah gifts, Braff allows him to fill in details with faux-letters that give background to the situations that surround the character. It is in these brutally honest, diary-like moments that it is easiest to fall in love with Jacob Green and all his unease.

Most impressive is Braff’s ability to make a character in his early teen years so relatable to an adult audience. Partly this works because the problems and emotions Jacob has to deal with are adult – too grown-up for such childlike innocence. And that is really the essence of adolescence: being hurled into grown-up situations without any preparation.

Also of note is Braff’s choice to weave this timeless story (awkward boy forced to find his place in the world) against such a specific background (Late-70s/Early-80s Jewish New England). Territories that may be unfamiliar to many – Hebrew School, Bar Mitzvahs, Torah readings – are explained and painted with an ease that adds richness and texture to the story.

Braff uses the 250 pages of the book to monitor the progression of Jacob Green from boy to man and attempts to illustrate this ongoing change through the narrative. Jacob The Narrator gets more jaded and crude as the book progresses, a technique that is ambitious and works well – most of the time. Near the end of the book, when Jacob describes a Hebrew School classmate as someone who “will make an ideal and horrific first wife for some dentist looking to marry his mom,” the skepticism and venom seems a little too adult – a sentiment that wouldn’t occur to someone like the Jacob that has been previously painted until he had been through a bad marriage of his own.

Read Joshua Braff's Blog HERE.