The idea that his book will be denounced by the Orthodox community irritates Englander. "I'm annoyed that anyone would think that I air dirty laundry in some way," he says. "This is in my head -- my imagination." Reactions from neighbors have, so far, been benign: Englander was stopped by a younger member of his parent's shul last week, who said his book was the topic du jour (in a good way) at Passover services.

Reviewers are already tossing the names of elder Jewish writers into the air as putative influences. Michiko Kakutani suggested Bernard Malamud (for "allegory and quotidian detail"), Franz Kafka ("humor and sadness"), and Isaac Bashevis Singer ("art and eros and the uncanny"). Englander's agent, Nicole Aragi, who started courting him in earnest after he'd sold two pieces to Story magazine as a student at Iowa, also notes an old-fashioned quality: "I don't know how he manages it: You talk to him and he's light and funny and cheery and young, and he hands over work that has an incredible gravity."

In Englander's fictional universe, husbands and wives don't communicate, compromises are made, lives are lost. But Englander's also satirizing the wider contemporary world as it rubs up against Orthodoxy. "The Gilgul of Park Avenue" stars a Wasp lawyer who has a revelation that he is, in fact, Jewish. He signs up for daily Torah lessons. He performs ritual ablutions. He throws away all the cheese. His wife is horrified, not least because she feels Orthodox Jews are too déclassé for Park Avenue: " 'Well, if you have to be Jewish, why so Jewish? Why not be like the Browns in 6-K? Their kid goes to Haverford. Why," she said, closing her eyes and pressing two fingers to her temple, 'why do people who find religion always have to be so goddamn extreme?' " It seems that she cannot love him as a Jew.

As a boy, Englander wouldn't dare switch on a light during the Sabbath for fear his grandparents would burn in hell. Today, the only thing extreme about him is his hair, so integral to his demeanor that it may have inspired his touching, even feminist story "The Wig." Ruchuma, Royal Hills's finest wig-maker, has lost her figure and her looks, but she sees her youth on the head of a delivery boy with a pierced chin. Offering him $4,000, she shears his locks and makes a wig for herself so she can upstage every other woman at temple. Englander grew his hair around the time of his first trip to Israel -- it wouldn't have been allowed at yeshiva. It's a running joke among Englander's friends; when he first arrived at Iowa, a classmate convinced fellow workshopper Chris Adrian that Englander was the former drummer from Ratt. (Adrian has since become one of Englander's best friends.)

Although he's now assuming rock-star status in the literary world, Englander is approaching his upcoming tour merely as a chance to see more of America. The last time Englander came home, he spent all his time in bookstores, scouting new writers and stockpiling books; he has said he would have given Knopf his manuscript for twenty titles from its backlist. We walk past the St. Mark's Bookshop, and his book is in the window. He doesn't stop for a snapshot.

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Alexandra Lange
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