Nathan Englander is a very fine writer. Ministry of Special Cases is filled with unpretentious writing that flows across the page. For a novel about as difficult a subject as the disappeared of Argentina’s dirty war tone is a challenge: too serious and the reader will enter a void of sorrow and death, but such events are serious and levity must be handled with just the right touch. Englader’s story of Kaddish and his wife Lillian and son Pato set in Buenos Aires in 1976 resonates with the despair but also irony and touches of humor that make the experiences of the family resonate with the reader. Of the three characters, the failure prone Kaddish stands out as a memorable creation, a Job-like character caught in a Kafkaesque world. The other characters in the novel aren’t as vibrant, however, and details about Argentina are integrated cleverly into the plot yet they are on the whole facile choices. Recoleta Cemetery and Argentines’ propensity for cosmetic surgery both are functional to the plot and highly symbolic. Each is representative enough of Argentina but is the sort of things a tourist learns in a few days in Argentina, something any cab driver in Buenos Aires will tell you to explain the Argentine condition to you. A look at the sources Englander mentions in a brief note at the end of the novel seems to confirm a lack of engagement with the subject. The sources Englander cites are the obvious ones, and ones in English at that. My question then, finally, is why did Englander write this novel? For the U.S. reader unfamiliar with the dirty war in Argentina the book will have some value but there is little that is new. Setting the story entirely in the 1970s leaves out the opportunity to give the novel some contemporary relevance, either in relation to Argentina’s current struggles with instability and insecurity or as a means of reflecting on governments and terrorism in a post 9/11 world. As the novel covers well trod ground and offers little in the way of new reflections on its subject Ministry of Special Cases feels like a successful exercise by a talented writer: it fulfills the task it sets out for itself but why this is a story that needed to be told isn’t so clear.
