Peep Show

David Arbus will be graduating from high school in the spring of 1975. His divorced parents offer two options: embrace his mother's Hasidic sect or go into his father's line of work, running a porn theater in the heart of New York's Times Square. He joins the family business. What else would a healthy seventeen-year-old with an interest in photography do? But he didn't think it would mean giving up his mother and sister altogether.

Peep Show is the bittersweet story of a young man torn between a mother trying to erase her past and a father struggling to maintain his dignity in a less-than-savory business. As David peeps through the spaces in the screen that divides the men and the women in Hasidic homes, we can't help but think of his father's Imperial Theatre, where other men are looking at other women through the peepholes.

As entertaining as it is moving, Peep Show looks at the elaborate ensembles, rituals, assumed names, and fierce loyalties of two secret worlds, stripping away the curtains of both.

"Braff's second novel (after The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green) is a straightforward family drama set amidst an extreme clash of cultures. In the mid 1970s, 16-year-old David Arbus is caught between his mother, whose Hasidic faith is becoming more and more central to her life, and his father, who runs a Times Square porn theatre. A seemingly modest act of rebellion makes David's choice for him, and he quickly finds himself enmeshed in the business of adult entertainment. While his increasingly ill father resists innovations like peep booths and in-house blue movies, David takes photography gigs and tends to his dad. His attempts to maintain a relationship with his sister bring David into sporadic contact with his mother, but rather than reconciling, mother and son only grow further apart. Braff brings together two very different cultures with sympathy for both, but the slim novel leaves little room to adequately develop each member of the family, and, as a result, the story doesn't quite sing. Nevertheless, David and his parents present an intriguing contrast in the struggle to uphold a set of values and the painful necessity of compromise. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Braff skillfully illuminates the failures and charms of a broken family . . . Haunts long after the final page."

--People

San Francisco Chronicle

"A tumultuous family drama . . . the glimpse [Braff] offers of these strange and usually closed institutions makes for interesting and enlightened reading." --San Francisco Chronicle

BookPage

"Although Peep Show could be a heavy-handed family drama, Braff chooses to keep the story light, sketching several funny but poignant scenes . . . The comic thrust, however, never detracts from the novel's intimate peek into a divided family." --BookPage

"Peep Show" is the bittersweet story of a young man torn between a mother trying to erase her past and a father struggling to maintain his dignity in a less-than-savory business.

Joshua Braff the author of The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green, lives in California with his wife and two children.