Shalom Auslander came to wide attention with the publication in 2005 of Beware of God, a collection of stories spawned by a Modern Orthodox upbringing as austere as it was terrifying. Given a world that took God's commandments seriously, it is hardly surprising that He emerges as the major character in Auslander's fiction, nor is it especially surprising that the stories themselves are simultaneously intense and sophomoric.

Foreskin's Lament is a richer, much funnier book, partly because Auslander has honed his anecdotes with gem-like precision and pacing, and partly because he now knows enough to leaven his anger with humor. Generally speaking, Yiddish writers in the Old World quarreled with God; generally speaking, their American-Jewish counterparts quarrel with Mom. Despite Auslander's ongoing parental squabbles — as his wife puts it, "They really did a number on you." — he is closer to those Jewish writers who quarreled with God — but with this important difference: Auslander delivers his brief against God in English while they wrote theirs in Yiddish. The result is that Jews and non-Jews alike learn every unthinkable detail as Auslander comes clean about his father's penchant for getting drunk on Shabbos wine, his brother's cache of pornography, his mother's dildo collection, and, not least of all, Auslander's long career as a commandment-defying rebel who smokes dope, eats treif, and pilfers clothing from Macy's. Small wonder that many Jews — and not all of them Orthodox — worried about what was hanging from the public clotheslines of Monsey, NY.

However, what this thumbnail sketch of the Auslander clan leaves out are the moments when he builds things with his tool-happy Dad or remembers what his mother baked. To twist the words of the old Groucho Marx song, Auslander has the feeling that he wants to go but still has the feeling that he wants to stay.

My hunch is that Auslander is a fundamentalist in ways that most Orthodox Jews are not. What matters to the others is that one obey God's commandments, not so much what one thinks about God theologically. Auslander, by contrast, is all about a God who is soooo God, meaning that he is cunning, crafty, given to irony, and, above all else, fiercely punishing, Again and again, Auslander reminds his readers that he is not "observant," but that he is religious — meaning that he fears, really fears, God's wrath. Small wonder, then, that he worries his wife will die in childbirth and that his child will be stillborn.

The poet Theodore Roethke once wrote: "Running from God is the longest race of all." No doubt Auslander would agree because he has been trying to elude the grip of God's commandments for most of his life, only to discover that he can violate the Torah 613 ways to Saturday and still feel himself within God's grasp.

Auslander begins his tale of neurotic woe by nearly convincing himself that God will strike down his unborn son; Foreskin's Lament ends at his son's first birthday party. The following words are iced on his cake:

"Happy birthday, Paix. From Mommy, Daddy, Harley, Duke [their dogs] and no one else in our families because they are bitter miseries who'd rather drag us into the morass of their bleak, tragic lives than share for a moment in our joy. And many more."

Paix (rhymes with Max), who was circumcised in a hospital by a secular doctor rather than by a Torah-observant mohel, will, presumably, be everything that his father, whose first name also means "peace," could not be — at least that's the hope. As Auslander puts it on his memoir's last page: "I believe in God. It's a real problem for me."

Indeed, believing in God is what occasions the pain only partially relieved by his dark humor and wonderfully crafted paragraphs. No doubt there are those who hope that Foreskin's Lament will put an end to Auslander's screed against Orthodoxy and the Jewish God. But given his ever-deeper connections with magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine, as well as a regular gig as a contributor to NPR's This American Life, it's a better bet that we'll be seeing Auslander's laments for many years to come. After all, taking on God is a Big Subject, one that can easily last a lifetime.