The Château

3.1/5 ( ratings)

The acclaimed author of The Yid takes us behind the scenes of a Florida condo board election, delivering a wild spin on Miami Beach, petty crime, Jewish identity, and life in Trump's America.

It is January 2017 and Bill has hit rock bottom. Yesterday, he was a successful science reporter at The Washington Post. Today, fired from his job, with exactly $1,219.37 in his checking account, he learns that his college roommate, a plastic surgeon known far and wide as the “Butt God of Miami Beach,” has fallen to his death under salacious circumstances. With nothing to lose, Bill heads for Florida, ready to begin his own investigation—a last ditch attempt to revive his career. There’s just one catch: Bill’s father, Melsor.

Melsor Yakovlevich Katzenelenbogen —poet, literary scholar, political dissident, small-time-crook—is angling for control of the condo board at the Chateau Sedan Neuve, a crumbling high-rise populated mostly by Russian Jewish immigrants. The current board is filled with fraudsters, and Melsor will use any means necessary to win the election. And who better to help him—through legal and illegal means—than his estranged son?

Featuring a colorful cast of characters, The Chateau injects the crime novel genre with surprising idiosyncrasy, subverting it with dark comic farce in a setting that becomes a microcosm of Trump’s America.