If you saw Yas­mi­na Reza’s play ​“ART” on Broad­way, then you will have some sense of her voice: a mix of humor, irony, and seri­ous­ness. Reza’s voice is at the heart of this nov­el, which could also be titled, ​“Fam­i­ly Squab­bles at Auschwitz.” It’s as if Jer­ry Sein­feld went to Auschwitz with his friends. 

Three adult sib­lings of a Hun­gar­i­an Jew­ish fam­i­ly now resid­ing in Paris — Serge, Jean, and Nana — plus one grown daugh­ter, set off on this ill-con­ceived jour­ney, squab­bling every step of the way. As the nar­ra­tor says, ​“The over­ar­ch­ing idea of this expe­di­tion — I’m still try­ing to get to grips with it — was, to put it with all the solem­ni­ty of our time, to vis­it the grave of our Hun­gar­i­an rel­a­tives. Peo­ple we nev­er knew, who we’d nev­er heard talk of, whose mis­for­tunes seem not to have upend­ed our mother’s life. But that’s our fam­i­ly; they died because they were Jew­ish, they expe­ri­enced the macabre fate of a peo­ple whose her­itage we car­ry on, and in a world besot­ted with the word ​‘mem­o­ry,’ it seems igno­min­ious to wash one’s hands of such a matter.”

A chasm of per­spec­tive exists between each mem­ber of the fam­i­ly as well as between the gen­er­a­tions. It’s easy, as an Amer­i­can Jew, to iden­ti­fy with one or anoth­er of these char­ac­ters, whether it’s Serge, who hates the idea of this trip from the get-go, or the nar­ra­tor, Jean, who veers from kind­ness to irony in the space of one para­graph. They are not on the same page in life or in the face of such hor­ror. Which is what makes this nov­el so believ­able. And so mod­ern. We expect solemn piety and get the opposite. 

Clear­ly, this nov­el will not be for every­one but for oth­ers it will be pitch perfect.