A fake Holocaust survivor, pilfered Nazi art, hallucinatory angels (who might or might not be real), Hasidic apostates, suicide attempts, infidelity, and a week at a secluded sanitarium — all explosive subject matter for any book. In Morris Collins’s new novel, The Tavern at the End of History, these various lightning bolts don’t really strike — at least not in the first three-quarters of the book. Rather, the effect is a slow burn. The characters who converge at the Nod Sanitorium along the Maine coastline are depressed, and this is felt.
“Nod” is a portentous name for an isolated sanitarium — it is also the name of the land east of Eden to which Cain was exiled to after murdering his brother. And, like the biblical patriarch, each of the players in this drama is operating under a nimbus of guilt or grief.
The book opens with an unhappily married professor named Jacob. He and his wife are slowly but inextricably moving towards divorce, and he was recently fired from his position for speaking bluntly to an overly sensitive (and, revealed later, ridiculous) student. With apparently nothing better to do, Jacob latches on to a Holocaust survivor named Baer who is trying to recover a long lost piece of art currently in the possession of another Holocaust survivor named Alex Baruch whose life story was recently revealed as fraudulent. (This is not giving much away — most of these terms are set within the first thirty pages of the three-hundred-plus page book.)
The art is being auctioned off at the Nod sanitarium and Jacob drives up to Maine with another lost soul named Rachel, seemingly to intervene and secure the piece for Baer. But the recovery of the art is largely a MacGuffin. What Collins really wants to do is get Jacob, Rachel, Baruch and a number of other equally bereft characters to the sanitarium where they can discuss their various visions of life and Judaism, delve into their backstories, and swap unfinished jokes.
The book’s previous self-discipline is cast aside in the final section after the auction goes awry and the reader is suddenly cast back to the hellish landscape of the Holocaust and the travels of the particular piece of art that spawned this whole drama in the first place.
The effect that Collins is seemingly going for — repression followed by explosion — will be familiar territory to any student of psychoanalysis. A number of the characters are forgotten, and the main ones are left dangling at the end. But, then, closure is often elusive for the patients of a sanitarium.
Max Gross is a novelist and journalist who lives in Forest Hills. His 2020 novel, The Lost Shtetl, won a National Jewish Book Award.
