by Maureen Corrigan, NPR, USA - As he surely intended, Shalom Auslander opens up a whole big can of slimy moral and aesthetic dilemmas in his debut novel Hope: A Tragedy. Maybe plunking Anne Frank down in your novel — as, by the way, Philip Roth did in The Ghost Writer and, later, in Exit, Ghost — is excusable if there's a big enough point and if your writing is strong enough to carry it off. Maybe artistically appropriating Anne Frank — herself a brilliantly observant artist of her own tragic predicament — is not as creepy as dressing your child up to look like a little girl who, like Frank, was murdered. And maybe I have a headache because Auslander clearly wants to lampoon identity politics, as well as the acutely understandable Jewish sense of victimization, by sending up Anne Frank, aka, as she says here, "Miss Holocaust, 1945."