Tod Goldberg is a much-lauded novelist with a wicked sense of humor. He returns to wrap up Eduardo Santiago’s fifth-annual Idyllwild Authors Series on Sunday, June 28.
If you can’t decide whether to laugh or cry at life’s absurdities and enjoy a well-crafted piece of fiction — dark, zany and touching — Goldberg’s discussion of his latest novel “Gangsterland” (Counterpoint, 2014) will be a shot in the arm. It also will settle the question as to whether what happens in Vegas is really bizarre enough to keep in Vegas. It is.
In “Gangsterland,” Goldberg sends up Las Vegas at its opulent height — prior to 9/11 and the economic downturn — when new casinos, each more lavish than the ones before, were displacing the seedy charm of old Las Vegas; when it was astonishingly magnificent at night and depressingly down at heals in the sunlight.
Family man Sal Cupertine is a legendary hit man for the Chicago Mafia, known for his clean and untraceable kills — until he blows it, botching an assassination and killing three undercover FBI agents in the process. With a choice of death or reassignment, Cupertine chooses plastic surgery and some theological training, and goes undercover in Las Vegas as Rabbi David Cohen, responsible for a growing congregation, the temple and its cemetery.
And while the Chicago family uses the temple and cemetery for money and body laundering, and a rogue FBI agent tries to track down the killer of his comrades, Sal/Rabbi Cohen begins to undergo a transformation of faith; reading the Torah and attending to the faithful starts to work for him.
Said Goldberg about his book, “My job as a crime writer is to take something inherently preposterous and make it believable. And since the transformation of hit man to rabbi is a large part of the book, I needed to understand the religious nature of that transformation.”
Goldberg, who both in conversation and in print is bracingly funny, said his own personality helped him in writing Sal. “Fortunately, I was already a sociopath and not that much of a Jew,” he said.
With all of Goldberg’s writing, sense of place is vital. Location also is a major character in the piece. Goldberg knows Vegas, especially at the time he is writing about it in “Gangsterland.” “I lived there and was a newspaper columnist and book critic during the time I wrote about in the novel,” he noted. “I won Nevada Press Association awards. And, as a Jew, I have my Las Vegas s--t down.”
Of “Gangsterland,” the New York Times Sunday Book Review said, “Tod Goldberg’s ‘Gangsterland’ will arrive as a gloriously original Mafia novel: 100 percent unhinged about the professionally unhinged.”
Goldberg is the author of more than a dozen books, many of them fiction award finalists. “Gangsterland” is currently a finalist for the Hammett Prize. He holds an master’s degree in fine arts in creative writing and literature from Bennington College in Vermont and directs the Low Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside.
He appears with Santiago at 4 p.m. Sunday, June 28, on the deck of Cafe Aroma in Idyllwild. The event is free to the public.
For more about Goldberg, visit www.todgoldberg.com.
