The Trickster

America in the 1940s. The story centers on a man named Hertz Minsker, a self-contradictory hybrid of existentialist philosopher, religious thinker, and psychoanalysis theorist, rejecting all categories in favor of what he calls "the study of man," a medley of reflections on humanity and its aspirations.

Minsker cannot complete any book he starts, yet some Jewish emigrants, who speak Yiddish like him, consider him a genius-failure, a lost soul from a renowned rabbinical family, as he constantly begs money from his wife, friends, and girlfriends, but has the potential to become a great man.

Minsker is surrounded by equally lost individuals — his best friend-businessman, who often provides him financial support, this businessman's wife, a hack poetess who longs to break into the world of Yiddish literature, a housewife spiritualist who organizes fake sessions for Minsker, and his wife, who lives in constant depression because she left her husband and children in Poland and ran away with Hertz to America.

The novel traces the actions of these and other characters while Minsker turns their already complicated personal lives into complete chaos.