The other side
The wishful belief that if Lee Harvey Oswald had been anywhere but Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy would have withdrawn the modest contingent of U.S. troops from Vietnam and created a Golden Age of peace and prosperity has a parallel in Israeli politics. After a flamboyant career as a ruthless warrior and rightwing hawk, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon enraged his supporters by unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza. Many are convinced that Sharon was on the verge of dismantling Jewish settlements on the West Bank and recognizing a Palestinian state when he was incapacitated by a stroke in 2006. Powerless to do anything, even feed himself, he remained in a coma for eight years, until his death in 2014.
Most of “Dinner at the Center of the Earth” is set in 2014, when the General, a character closely resembling Sharon, lies in a coma, attended by his faithful factotum, Ruthi. As his bloated body finally fails him, the General’s mind wanders back through his brilliant but tarnished military career. He is tormented by memories of the massacre he carried out in the Arab town Qibya and his son’s accidental gunshot death. The General — “warrior, peacemaker, murderer, saint” — longs for reconciliation.
Meanwhile, a character referred to as Prisoner Z languishes in solitary confinement at a black site in the Negev. The General ordered his imprisonment more than a dozen years ago, and no one else but Ruthi and Ruthi’s son, who is hired, off the books, to be his only guard, knows of Prisoner Z’s existence. Throughout his secret incarceration, Prisoner Z, unaware that for the past six years the General has been incommunicado, has been writing letters to him, pleading for release or at least recognition within prison records.
With his debut, in the 1999 story collection “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” which won the PEN/Malamud Award, Nathan Englander was hailed as the heir to Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, the bearer of the bright promise of another generation of American Jewish authors. Except for its focus on the fate of the Jewish state, Englander’s fourth book, his second novel (after “The Ministry of Special Cases”), is a spy thriller that has more in common with John le Carré than Cynthia Ozick. Chapters about the General and Prisoner Z alternate with others set in 2002 in Berlin and Paris that recount the blunders of an inept American recruited by the Mossad. A decision to follow his conscience rather than his handler will turn him into Prisoner Z.
Also included in Englander’s cast of characters are Shira, an Israeli negotiator, and her Palestinian counterpart, a man referred to only as the mapmaker. Though the obstacles to their relationship are as formidable as the obstacles to Middle East peace, Shira and the mapmaker fall in love and plot to overcome the forces separating them.
Like Dorit Rabinyan’s recent novel “All the Rivers,” “Dinner at the Center of the Earth” is a wistful fantasy of an impossible Israeli-Palestinian romance. Rabinyan, an Israeli, sets most of her novel in New York, whereas Englander, an American, sets none of his in the United States. Though written in English, it is attentive to the distinctive landscapes of Israel and speech patterns of Israelis. It could pass as a translation from Hebrew.
Englander constructs his novel out of fragments — short, incisive chapters that require the reader to jump back and forth between 2014 and 2002 and Israel and Europe. Much of the end is told before the beginning, so the suspense that keeps us turning pages is not over what will happen next, but rather over what is the larger pattern that connects characters and situations. What does a frantic, comic interlude in Paris involving a renegade spy and an Italian heiress have to do with the Palestinian peace process?
It is not until the final chapter that the meaning of the title, “Dinner at the Center of the Earth,” becomes clear. Though the novel’s scattered design might irritate some readers who yearn for coherence, it reinforces the vision of a world in which each is condemned to separate, mute quarantine.
At the center of “Dinner at the Center of the Earth” is a young American schlemiel who bungles the enterprise of espionage. Motivated by solidarity with Zionist ideals he reveres, he inadvertently becomes complicit with atrocity. However, by taking a stand against injustice, he condemns himself to solitude and silence.
The General, too, is trapped. By the time he is ready to renounce militarism and chauvinism, he is lying in a coma, speechless. Shira and the mapmaker are less fully realized, but, sundered by the Gaza fence, they can only yearn. If you hunger to dine at the center of the earth, expect no company but worms and moles.
Steven G. Kellman teaches comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com