Jacob's Ladder by Joel Yanofsky
A romantic comedy written with the authenticity of a memoir, Jacob’s Ladder is full of wit, slapstick and heart. It conjures up the great screwball comedies of the 1940s. Joel Yanofsky’s setting is anglophone Montreal — a community which has, over the years, both changed dramatically and dramatically resisted change. The same is true of narrator Jacob Glassman, a thirtysomething Oliver Twist stuck in the suburban home he grew up in and clinging to the status quo for dear life. Not easy to do for a man at the wrong end of two separate love triangles. When it comes to craziness, Jacob points out, there’s an awfully wide margin for error. In Jacob’s Ladder, that margin is stretched to the limit by a cast of hilarious, haywire characters: rogue real estate agents, sentimental adulterers, an obese shrink, a transsexual newspaper editor and a proselytizing rabbinical student with his sight set on Jacob’s bewildered soul.
Click here to search for this book at the Atwater Library.