David Flusfeder review for JC by Jenni Frazer April 2026
David Flusfeder’s latest work is a slim novella entitled Something Might Fall, and, indeed, the cover looked so much as though it had been dropped in a muddy puddle, before being stuffed in an envelope, that I was driven to ask the publicist whether I had received a damaged copy.
But no. It seems it is meant to look like that. Part of, I have been assured, an homage to the 1970s novels of Philip Roth. Okay…
Flusfeder, like Roth, is American, but has spent most of his life (he is now 66) in the UK, where he has built up a sterling reputation as a literary novelist, critic, columnist and playwright. He is currently director of creative writing at the University of Kent, and is also, I discover, a whizz at poker, once chairman of the Rules Committee of the International Federation of Poker, and a former poker columnist for the Sunday Telegraph.
The cover also features rave reviews describing Something Might Fall as Flusfeder’s “masterpiece”, “sophisticated and poignant” and even “an exquisite piece of writing.” Well, I thought, and set to reading the slim to emaciated 75 pages to discover this exquisiteness for myself.
The novella is set in two separate years, 1970 and 1974. In New York in 1970, where they have apparently rarely heard of paragraphs, we meet Emma Hoffman, a discontented married writer who lives on the Upper West Side of the city, and has spent most of her marriage hosting upscale parties. Invitations to such parties are supposedly the social cachet of the in-crowd.
Emma has an unpleasant-sounding husband called Nicholas Sawyer, a Park Avenue doctor. They are Jewish, just: she has had “an assimilated Long Island childhood”, and occasionally “lapses into Yiddish” when she tells him before their marriage that she is “not such a metsiye [bargain]”. His grandfather had arrived “from pogrom Europe with the name Seger and quickly changed it”, his grandson “not having the gumption to change it back.”
But they marry anyway and though her writing dries up, she pours all her energy into the upbringing of their son, Little Nicky.
Perhaps because of the writer’s block, or that the parties similarly come to a halt — I couldn’t tell — Emma cannot go on.
Four years later, in 1974, Little Nicky is about to mark his 11th birthday and we join him on a meandering walking tour of Manhattan. As readers, we might naturally assume that something bad is about to befall him: perhaps he will be attacked, robbed, run over, or — given the novella’s title — fall off a bridge somewhere.
I regret to report that none of the above happens, not least because Flusfeder tells us that the now departed Emma left a cache of letters for her son, to be opened on birthdays, even when he was an adult and no longer Little Nicky.
With the best will in the world I was not engaged by Little Nicky or either of his parents. Others may find the Sawyers more charming.
Something Might Fall by David Flusfeder is published by Salt Publishers on May 4 at £10.99