SOURCE: "A 'Prince' of a First Novel," in Books Today—Chicago Tribune, June 14, 1994, p. 5.

[Pinsker is an American scholar, poet, and author of several books on contemporary American literature, including the critical study Between Two Worlds: The American Novel in the 1960s (1978), and two books on the works of novelist Philip Roth. In the following highly positive review, Pinsker notes the lessons learned by the novel's protagonist/narrator.]

Alan Isler's impressive first novel, The Prince of West End Avenue, is a tale of a group of retirement-home thespians trying to mount a production of Hamlet—against the long odds of death, failing health and internal bickering—that ultimately becomes an extended metaphor of our nightmarish century and the human race's capacity to survive its worst brutalization.

The novel's protagonist-narrator is Otto Korner, a Holocaust survivor, one-time poet (his book of poems, published in Germany when he was 19, was...