When solomon Kugel moved his family from the big city to an old country farmhouse, he expected the garden-variety oddball neighbor and raccoons with nefarious designs on his garbage cans. What he couldn’t anticipate was a serial arsonist targeting historic homes—or a potty-mouthed crone squatting in his attic who claims to be (are you sitting down?) Anne Frank. Shalom Auslander (Foreskin’s Lament) amplifies his irreverent, take-no-prisoners voice in Hope: A Tragedy (Riverhead), a deliriously absurd farce about mortality and neurotic attachment to misery. Auslander writes with a steel brush, abrasive and cleansing.