Bream Gives Me Hiccups, by Jesse Eisenberg

Jesse Eisenberg’s collection is a study in neurotica, taking humour and hilarity from the pains and delusions of the New York millennial.

Book Review by Holly Rimmer-Tagoe | 07 Oct 2015
Book title: Bream Gives Me Hiccups
Author: Jesse Eisenberg

The stories exist in a distorted prism of illusion, where every reflection says, 'me, me, me.'

The comedy setup is clear. Eisenberg is playing to the crowd, with a disdain for hipsters and the bourgeois bandwagon-jumpers who are never seen without a copy of Lolita, a green juice, or a line about ways to flirt in a ‘post-gender’ world.

The collection takes the reader on an assault course where pellets, stun guns and miscellaneous tyre rings are replaced by an ambush of every anxiety and neurosis that the therapist’s book can throw at you. Daddy issues, the breakdown of a relationship seen through the prism of the Bosnian genocide, and smiling through the murder of a now happy ex make up Eisenberg’s treatise on the modern world. As a parody of the people he has made a career playing, it would be difficult to write a book that is more Jesse Eisenberg.

At some point, roughly after the fifth restaurant review from a privileged child, the dry irony begins to wear thin. The problem with Eisenberg’s decision to opt for first-person narration – arguably, the only way that he could portray neurosis effectively – is that you find yourself hoping for the staccato, self-censoring constraint of the verse to burst out into a tirade of emotion. The emotional outlet is glimpsed (in Smiling Tricks Your Brain into Thinking It’s Happy), but never fulfilled. [Holly Rimmer-Tagoe]


Out now, published by Grove Press, RRP £18.99