The Street Sweeper, Elliot Perlman’s latest novel, comes freighted with high expectations and a fanfare of publicity. This, it would appear, is a book to watch. Perlman has come a long way from his sombre though slight first book, Three Dollars, and his short-story collection The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming, with tales that ultimately contained more pith than juice. His last novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity, a bustling, ambitious affair, gave us seven different narrators offering seven takes on contemporary life. The Street Sweeper takes the breadth and scope of its predecessor, together with the keen-eyed social awareness of his earlier work, and multiplies it. The result is a riveting study of racial intolerance and its repercussions as experienced by characters from different generations and diverse ethnic backgrounds. Perlman peoples his epic novel with a large and disparate cast. However, there are two significant strands in the novel and so two main leads. Lamont Williams, the eponymous street sweeper, has just been released from prison. Determined to wipe the slate clean, he begins his probationary period as a janitor at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and, between shifts, attempts to track down the daughter he hasn’t seen for years. Adam Zignelik is a history professor at Columbia University who loses his bid for tenure, splits with his girlfriend and then sinks into self-doubt. Though culturally dissimilar – Adam is Jewish and American-Australian, Lamont is African-American – both men are united in their status as undervalued, misunderstood cast-offs appealing for a second chance. That break comes in the unlikely guise of history. Lamont befriends Henryk Mandelbrot, a dying patient at the hospital and, more importantly, an Auschwitz survivor. Mandelbrot gives him a menorah but also an account of his war years, entrusting both to Lamont and urging him to commit to memory every harrowing detail. “Tell everyone what happened here,” Mandelbrot recites. Adam’s stab at redemption comes when he discovers a cache of lost interviews with Holocaust survivors. Suddenly his apathy evaporates and he is given a shot in the arm to resuscitate his floundering career. As he listens to the recordings of what were then called “displaced persons”, the interviewer, one Henry Border, utters the line: “Who is going to stand in judgement over all of this and who is going to judge my work?” This need to judge is crucial to the novel. In many ways it is expected – the author was formerly a lawyer in his hometown of Melbourne. But Perlman goes a step further and explores not only the ramifications of humankind’s compulsion to judge one another but also, more pertinently, to prejudge. For at the dark heart of The Street Sweeper we find an illuminating study of prejudice, specifically the two main strains that blighted the first half of the 20th century. Perlman ingeniously fuses anti-black racism with anti-Semitism. During a history lecture, Adam discusses the “parallels between the situation of blacks in the United States and the Jews in Germany”. When out of his job and rudderless, a friend rescues him from the doldrums by asking him to research and prove the hushed-up fact that black US soldiers helped liberate Dachau – before being whitewashed out of history. Adam finds one former soldier who “risked his life in a segregated army fighting Nazism in Europe, came home to fight the civil rights battles we fought and now he just wants to be left alone. He can no longer bear the indignity of having to prove anything to anyone.” Perlman informs us that the role of the historian is to build “a bridge into the unknown” and he excels when he moves from his characters’ private turmoil of the present to the global horrors of the past. His descriptions of life in the Jewish ghettoes and the shorter existence in the camps make for sober reading. Initially we may feel that this is familiar territory, but to render his scenes more “unknown” Perlman takes us down deeper tunnels that are so visceral they are practically unbearable. He has mastered the first rule of recreating the Holocaust in art: never be afraid of excess. Indeed, any attempt to downplay the gratuitous leads to charges of inauthenticity, and thus a dereliction of duty. Perlman avoids this by having Mandelbrot tell Lamont that he was a member of the Sonderkommando and so assigned with herding Jews into the gas chambers and then transferring the corpses to the crematoria. Mandelbrot doesn’t skimp on detail. Lamont, and the reader, have to learn so they don’t forget.