Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Political thriller explores Israeli-Palestinian conflict
At the bleak, lonely center of Nathan Englander’s new novel are two prisoners trapped in states of limbo. The man identified for much of the book only as “Prisoner Z” has, as of 2014, spent years enduring an unrelenting, radically isolated captivity in a black site in Israel’s Negev desert. Meanwhile, Z’s counterpart, a famous military campaigner referred to throughout only as “the General,” lingers in a vegetative coma, having succumbed to a severe stroke several years before.
Prisoner Z’s only human contact is with his guard; they have established an unusual friendship. It is, Englander writes, “a relationship they’ve both treasured, in what they both understood to be a very Stockholm-syndrome kind of way, a relationship Prisoner Z liked to call ‘Patty Hearstish,’ a reference the guard had been compelled to look up.” But despite his isolation, Z has not given up hope; one of his few activities is writing letters of appeal which he hopes will somehow reach the General — of whose incapacitation he is entirely unaware.
One might worry that a man in a coma and a permanent prisoner would offer limited narrative possibilities. But “Dinner at the Center of the Earth” ranges among stories, switching between places and times. Some of these fill in the back stories of the General and Prisoner Z. The reader is granted access to the constant stream of private memories and fantasies that flood through the General’s mind as his body wastes away in its hospital bed. And we are given a view of Z in his pre-incarceration days, as a free man in Paris who, in the aftermath of a fatal error whose details we only gradually learn, becomes aware that his days of freedom are numbered.
Other plotlines revolve around characters whose connections with the central stories are not immediately apparent. In Berlin in 2002 a friendship slowly grows between Josh, a Canadian businessman, and Farid, a fellow businessman whose real interests lie in improving the lives of his fellow Gazans. On the Israel-Gaza boundary in 2014, two lovers, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, plan to meet for dinner in a secret underground tunnel that lies beneath the border that separates them.
All of these plotlines eventually come together. But the novel is to some degree designed to, at the very least, test readers’ patience. It withholds for much of its length a good deal of information, not only regarding the connections between the various narratives, but even concerning such basic facts as the names of most of the central characters.
There are reasons behind this withholding. The interminable confinements of Prisoner Z and the General symbolize and express the frustration and desperation engendered by the interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (What is more, it turns out that the characters have real-life counterparts; the General is a fictionalized version of Ariel Sharon, while Prisoner Z was inspired by Ben Zygier, the notorious “Prisoner X” who died in an Israeli prison cell in 2010.) Similarly, the aura of uncertainty and metaphysical slipperiness that surrounds the characters’ constantly shifting identities metaphorically reflects the shadowy and morally ambiguous world of espionage these characters move through.
Unfortunately, this baggage tends to overshadow the characters. They are part symbol and part cipher, but only rarely do they feel fully human. Englander has in the past written memorably and insightfully about the tragedies and complexities of recent Middle Eastern history. But while “Dinner at the Center of the Earth” should be admired as a sincere attempt to write a serious novel in the form of a political thriller about one of the globe’s most fascinating and troubled regions, it lacks the verve and incisiveness of Englander’s best work. Not every reader will be willing to stick around long enough to watch its various puzzle pieces finally come together.