Fic­tion

Peep Show

  • Review
By – August 25, 2011
David Arbus’ par­ents have been liv­ing in dif­fer­ent worlds for some time. Upon his high school grad­u­a­tion, he is forced to decide between the two. His moth­er is a baal teshu­va and estab­lish­ing her place in the Hasidic com­mu­ni­ty in Brook­lyn. His father has been run­ning a porn the­ater in Times Square for decades. Since he can­not accept his mother’s reli­gious world full of rules, David moves to the city to be with his father. He is intrigued by his father’s busi­ness, but strug­gles to keep ties with his younger sis­ter who has cho­sen to stay with their moth­er in the Hasidic world. David’s inter­est in pho­tog­ra­phy sends him on gigs for his father’s asso­ciates. A dream world for an eigh­teenyear– old, yet David keeps his dis­tance from the seedy side of the indus­try, which has gone from basic bur­lesque to elab­o­rate, explic­it movies pro­duced and dis­trib­uted by the the­aters. Braff draws an inter­est­ing par­al­lel between the peep show aspect of David’s father’s the­ater to the screen drawn across his mother’s Hasidic world, yet the nov­el is too brief to allow the read­er much famil­iar­i­ty with either.


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