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by Ellen Jaffe-Gill
Review of: Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail by Leslie Epstein. W. W. Norton. 264pp. $23.95
I have a friend who, when someone starts to tell him something he really doesn't want to know about that person's sex life or digestive tract, yells "Overshare!" That's what I hollered about every two pages while reading Ice Fire Water, Leslie Epstein's latest novel.
The protagonist of the story, Leib Goldkorn, a (bad) flutist and composer who appeared in an earlier Epstein work, is a 20th-century Candide, bouncing from Europe to Hollywood to Rio to Hawaii to New York. He lands in and out of trouble and causing a certain amount of havoc as he makes his benighted but intrepid way from situation to situation. Unlike Voltaire's hero, however, Goldkorn is self-centered and self-aggrandizing, determined to get his (bad) opera about the Biblical Esther to the ears of artistic decision makers no matter what performance he disrupts or whose lives he endangers.
We meet him at age 96, in the fifth-floor water closet of his Upper West Side tenement building, trying to achieve an erection so he can gratify himself per doctor's orders to relieve a beleaguered prostate. Inch by inch by little inch, he reports his progress. Overshare! One of the means he uses to get excited is to reminisce on sexy images and experiences of his youth, including seeing the Norwegian skater Sonja Henie, at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Bavaria and then meeting her in Hollywood two years later. (The fact that Henie was a notorious anti-Semite is noted in the novel but does not seem to bother Goldkorn or his creator.)
Ice Fire Wateri can be mildly amusing at its most Voltairesque, such as when Goldkorn, about to be arrested for placing his Esther score on the music stands of a Paris orchestra, receives a telegram inviting him to Hollywood to score Henie's next movie. (The telegram turns out to be intended for renowned composer E.W. Korngold, of course.) But most of the time Goldkorn, both as character and narrator, is just annoying, and by the last section, the story is way too dependent on creaky plot devices like coincidence and repeating characters, not to mention the old "it's only a movie" gag. Goldkorn's mangling of English after almost 60 years of living in America comes off not so much as colorful but as an indication of his cluelessness--and gets old very fast.
Candide was an endearing character despite his own cluelessness because of his modesty, his good will toward his fellow humans, and his youth. An egomaniacal, stubbornly obtuse (though too sharp to be senile) Candide who appears to have learned nothing about people in 96 years of living isn't funny--he's just a mess, and so is this novel.