BOOKS | The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green, review | Joshua Braff, Algonquin Books, 2004.

Celebrity brothers are all over the place right now.

Former Stand By Me star Jerry O’Connell’s brother Charlie is the new bachelor, and less-frighteningly, Joshua Braff, 37 – big brother of Garden State boy wonder Zach Braff – has written a novel.

Jacket: The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green, 2004.

The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green is about a Jewish kid growing up in New Jersey.

It’s sounds familiar, but fear not. This isn’t a regurgitation of little bro’s recent film.

Jacob Green is the middle child in a dysfunctional family (though dysfunction is such a part of the novel-normal, it’s not particularly notable). He’s got a learning disability that causes him to make spelling errors in his bar mitzvah thank-you notes, which incites the wrath of his impossible-to-please dad.

Hence, the unthinkable thoughts.

These are Jacob’s inner monologues, ranging in subject from his sperm count to his lust for his live-in baby sitter. And on a deeper level, they’re all about escaping his bad dad.

Imagine Adrian Mole as an American Jew.

Jacob’s thoughts are almost always funny, and occasionally outright hilarious, which save this novel from being a total sad-fest. At its heart, this is a serious book about family drama. It comes complete with an abusive dad, a damaged sibling and a parental split. Without the whole sperm count thing, it might really be depressing.

Braff was a student in the MFA Creative Writing program at St. Mary’s College.

He has been publishing in literary journals since, so it’s fair to say he knows what he’s doing. When the novel debuted in September of last year, USA Today went so far as to call it “Kvetcher in the Rye.” In bro-land (the land of novels and novel-critiques) being likened to J.D. Salinger is high praise, but in this case, I think well deserved.

The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green is a little shocking, and sadly sweet.

Fans of baby Braff’s Garden State will likely take to it, seeing as it has a lot of the same themes, but the novel stands on it’s own as well.

It would probably make a pretty good movie.

Note: This review was commissioned as filler content for Dose magazine, pre-launch. More book and author pieces are here.