Nice Jewish Girl Gone Really Bad

Leslie Schwartz's novel Jumping the Green could be subtitled "Nice Jewish Girl Gone Really Bad" as the 29-year old heroine Louise Goldblum, a San Francisco artist, takes a walk on the wild side after her older sister Esther gets murdered. The heroine gets involved with a s-m relationship with a photographer Zeke who beats her up, humiliates her etc. The novel alternates chapters of Louise's anti-romance with Zeke with flashbacks to her childhood as the youngest sibling of 5 with two alcoholic parents in the South Bay suburbs in the 1970s. Actually, the best parts of the novel as these flashback chapters. Schwartz portrays the lost 5 siblings running abandoned by their present-but-absent parents in this portrait of the bourgeois-life-gone-wrong.