The rose rabbi

the long version

Wolf Walker (the hero of Stern's previous novel The Suicide Academy) is now an ethical adviser to the Lester & French Advertising Agency. He survives in a mad world - a few years into the future - where the Pope has resigned, the Chateau Wars are raging in Europe, and the thousands of hunger strikes ravage the streets of America's cities. Convinced that his faulty memory is a kind of continuing suicide, Wolf sets out to recover a past for himself that will redeem his present. On his fortieth birthday, he searches out and confronts the dramatis personae of his life and forces them into wild, funny, and touching reconstructions: an experiment in combining life and art. The Rose Rabbi is a dramatic and comic meditation on the nature of art and the struggle between ethical life and raw daily experience.