[Brookner is an English novelist, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following review, she praises Isler's craft as a novelist and agrees with those critics who have favorably compared The Prince of West End Avenue with the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow.]

Since new talent invariably comes garlanded with prepublication encomia the potential reader is advised to adopt an attitude of caution. Alan Isler's novel [The Prince of West End Avenue], first published in America, has been compared with the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow: Cynthia Ozick has added her commendation. Can it possibly live up to such praise? It can, it does. The comparisons are not odious but they are very slightly wide of the mark. Singer is a mystic, Bellow an intellectual ruminant. Isler is a sharp-witted novelist who knows how to beguile his readers, and also to lay traps for them. Since the action of his story takes place in a Jewish retirement home, stuffed with argumentative and essentially like-minded characters, the result might have been intolerably self-regarding. Yet what emerges from this account of their affairs, and after considerable and masterly delay, is an awful dignity. These people, roughnecks some of them, are nevertheless and at the same time sophisticates. That is the fact of their survival, although the hero and narrator, Otto Korner, may not appreciate this particular irony. He is wise enough, however, to realise that he has no choice in the matter.

The Emma Lazarus Retirement Home in Manhattan, a comfortable establishment which we might well do to emulate over here (excellent cuisine, resident doctor, cultural activities) is inhabited by elderly parties whose wits and appetites have remained intact. In the intervals of breakfasts at Goldstein's Dairy Restaurant they are preoccupied with their forthcoming production of Hamlet, for which a particularly close reading of the text is undertaken by Otto Korner. Cast first as the Ghost, then demoted to Gravedigger, he longs to play Hamlet himself. Never mind that he is 83 years old: he has the experience. He is, or rather was, a man of letters; not only did he have a volume of poems published in his native Nuremberg, which brought him a treasured letter from Rilke, he was a student in Zurich at the epochal moment when Lenin was speaking in one part of town and Ball, Tzara, Arp and friends were performing in another. Indeed he may even have invented the term Dada for which the group became famous. Certainly he remembers a shambling figure with thick glasses who turned out to be James Joyce.

The letter from Rilke and the memory of his own literary efforts give Korner an added incentive to direct the production, a task which eventually becomes his by default, since the occupants of the Emma Lazarus home are occasionally overtaken by mortality. His ruminations on the play are surprisingly worthwhile, and mark him out as a genuine man of letters. At the same time he has to contend with the day-to-day life of the home and the vagaries of his companions. These are all dealt with sympathetically, and here the comparison with Bellow is valid: the overdressed and plaintive widows, the cracked former communists, and the priapic elders of both sexes all emerge vigorously from their different backgrounds and are devoid of the vulgarity with which they might be charged by those not of their number. Since an additional motif of the novel is the life force this is not surprising.

Korner's story differs from those of his fellows only in being more extreme. By the time he is waiting in his room for the call to play Hamlet we have learnt all there is to know about him. The brevity with which the information is disclosed is admirable. Like Hamlet he is no hero—but perhaps, he reflects, Hamlet was ashamed of and irritated by that cuckolded father and his belated call for revenge? There are embarrassments so severe that they can be life-threatening. Korner's passage from the incomparable culture of the pre-war German Jewish bourgeoisie to the Emma Lazarus home might be accounted a logical progression, given the manner in which the century has evolved. But not all victims are innocent. It was Korner's literary ambitions which were his undoing, and even in the Emma Lazarus home there is a witness to accuse him. But accuse him to his face: even here there is no subterfuge.

This is an excellent novel, not merely because every sentence is alive but because the reader might be persuaded that what is on offer is a mere comedy of manners. In fact Isler is several steps ahead of that reader on all counts, and it is his craft that one finally salutes. All that is known of the author is that he is English by birth, that he moved to America when he was 18 years old, that he has taught at Queens College in New York, that he is 60 years old, and that this is his first novel. The good news is that he is working on another. His remarkable debut is a cause for congratulation not only for the author but for the small American press which originally published him and for Jonathan Cape for buying the book and bringing it out in trade paperback. All in all, a distinguished and creditable enterprise, and a reminder that big money is not necessarily a guide to the production of excellent work.