Beyond borders
The politics of borders and boundaries — justifying them, establishing them and defending them — has come to occupy the center of our political arena. Joshua Cohen, author of last year’s “Book of Numbers,” sees boundaries everywhere in his latest novel, the complexly structured “Moving Kings,” which shuttles among four protagonists and two countries. And where he sees boundaries, he sees the inevitability of violence.
The books opens on David King, the hustling, crooked, sad-sack owner of a moving and storage company, King’s Moving. David is an intriguing if repellent figure — racist, combative, prone to conniptions until he gets his way, yet haunted by feelings of deep inadequacy. He’s divorced; dating his office manager, Ruth; and has a daughter, Tammy, a nonprofit grant writer who is an addict in recovery. In the course of a day, Cohen takes David from a Republican Committee Independence Day party in the Hamptons (where he’s painfully out of his element) on a route that loops him “crossisland, Queens to Brooklyn, Manhattan, then Jersey, only to turn back around again, Brooklyn to Queens,” before depositing him at his storage warehouse. There, David pilfers household items kept in storage from evicted tenants to furnish a place for Yoav Matzav, his cousin visiting from Israel who’s been released from his compulsory military service.
David met Yoav 14 years earlier on a trip to Israel to hide money from his thenwife, Bonnie, during their rancorous divorce. David has vague, highly romanticized ideas about his so-called homeland and sees Yoav as “a real Jew,” “grown up from the land.” He puts Yoav to work as a mover, but Yoav feels alienated and spends most of his free time sitting around his apartment in Queens, the previous tenants having been evicted by David.
During his time in the military, Yoav’s life was saved by one Corporal Uri Dugri. Where Yoav was an inept bumbler, Uri was a human battering ram whose military career goals were “the dark stuff, the hushed stuff, counterterrorism ops.” After assaulting his drill sergeant, Uri is demoted to the grunts, to work alongside Yoav destroying the homes of Palestinians and guarding the borders. “Palestinian workers going to, coming from, the factories in the Israeli industrial zones. Palestinian shepherds coming and going, to graze and water their flocks . ... From dawn to dusk checking IDs. Checking permits.”
Uri, upon release from the army, stays in Israel yet flounders. He has anger issues. He sees a rabbi and a psychiatrist, neither of whom can help. Desperate, he decides he needs to hook up with Yoav in the States to try to get direction in his life. And having saved his life, he figures, Yoav owes him. Uri comes to the U.S. and Yoav, not exactly delighted to be reunited, helps him get a job with King’s Moving just at a time when the company is ramping up its work evicting folks from the remaining far-flung, yet-to-begentrified neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
Enter Imamu Nabi, born Avery Luter. Imamu fought in Vietnam for a country that, as he sees it, “needed the brothers to beat the gooks, but also wanted the gooks to get rid of the brothers so America didn't have to.” Imamu loses his job as a tollbooth collector after getting robbed and coming under suspicion for the crime. Physical pains left over from the war have led to a growing addiction to legal and illegal pain relief. Unemployed, Imamu soon falls behind on the rent for the house he inherited from his deceased mother, leaving him open for eviction and setting the stage for a horrible confrontation.
Cohen has taken an interesting risk in “Moving Kings.” With its pivoting point of view, the book lacks anything in the way of a singular protagonist. David, Yoav, Uri and Imamu all seem to share equal billing, raising the question of whose story is being told. And though the novelty of the approach is exciting, the end result misses the mark. Cohen’s close third-person prose is textured and authoritative (if a touch patronizing at times), and it provides a unifying force for all its moving parts. But there’s a regrettable diffusion of energy at the denouement — energy Cohen has meticulously accumulated — with some of the primary characters either absent at the moment of crisis or obscured and witnessed from a distance. War photographer Robert Capa once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” “Moving Kings” gets close to troubling issues but has too much restless energy driving it to stay put and hold focus when it really needs to.