The wanting /

WELL into the 1990s, tens of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel and thousands of Israelis headed to West Bank towns to shop and get their cars fixed. It was the era before proliferating barriers and checkpoints and Arab satellite stations. Palestinians watched Israeli television and understood Hebrew. If a Palestinian worker's son was getting married, he might well invite an Israeli colleague or boss - and that Israeli might well attend. The relationships were in some sense colonial, hardly between equals. But they were real. Each side was forced to face the fact that on the other were human beings with legitimate concerns, not merely enemies to be feared and despised. There was a surprising, even poignant, intimacy to the conflict, something unimaginable today. Michael Lavigne has chosen the dying days of that era - the mid-1990s - as the setting for his ambitious novel about the yearning for homeland and spiritual fulfillment. His central characters - a Russian-Israeli architect and his 13-year-old daughter; a Palestinian youth and his father - are linked in ways both conscious and unconscious, haunting and invading one another's spaces, plotting with words and bombs and, occasionally, understanding one another as only familiar enemies can. He mixes conventional storytelling with magic realism and switches narrators often. Some of the most moving parts take place more than a decade earlier, when the architect, Roman Guttman, was a young man in Russia. There he contended with Soviet brutality; ached to feel at home in a place where Jews were constantly vulnerable; and fell for the politically daring woman who would give birth to the girl he later raises alone, in Israel. Lavigne is an American who came late to fiction writing. His first novel, "Not Me," which traced a son's efforts to find out who his father really was, was also about the mystical tug of history and violence in the struggle for identity. It was praised by Cynthia Ozick, among others, and won a Sami Rohr Choice Award for emerging Jewish writers. His new book, "The Wanting," begins with a terrorist attack. The perpetrator is a young Palestinian named Amir Hamid, from a village near Bethlehem, who - after humiliating mistreatment by Israeli soldiers and personal frustrations at home - falls in with Hamas ideologues. They have him strap on a suicide vest and go in search of an Israeli bus that stops outside Guttman's office. Guttman is hurt, with shards of glass in his arm and his face, and 10 others are killed; Amir is decapitated. But instead of getting what he expected - a heaven of "dark-eyed maidens and rivers of wine" - Amir ends up wandering the skies of the Holy Land watching Guttman and his daughter, as well as Amir's own father, deal with the aftermath of the attack. Observing Guttman from his celestial perch, Amir complains that the Israeli does not notice him. "You look at me but don't see," he says. "That's what all you Jews do. Oh please, yes, come, take my land because, after all, I do not exist. That's your story, isn't it?" It's a cunning summary of Palestinian rage: Amir has a point, but of course he is a ghost. In the wake of the attack, Guttman is given to similarly raw sentiments, a tribute to Lavigne's ability to get to the core of each side's emotions. The reality of the occupation is not hidden from the reader or from Guttman. But being the victim of a suicide bombing tends to sweep away subtlety. After leaving the hospital he asks a friend why the Israelis couldn't be left in peace: "'It's a war,' she said simply. "'War? What kind of war? Are we blowing up their buses? They didn't want us back in Russia; they don't want us here. Why don't we just walk ourselves right back into the gas chambers and make everybody happy?'" Guttman becomes obsessed with a fellow victim, a teenage girl in a coma, and then decides to visit Amir's family near Bethlehem with little forethought of what he's looking for. Meanwhile, his daughter is following her own dark path, drawn by Jewish extremists who are intent on replacing the Dome of the Rock with a third Jewish Temple. "The Wanting" contains strong descriptive writing and considerable cultural context - in Russia, in Israel and in Palestine. But sometimes Lavigne falters. The main action takes place in the spring of 1996, yet he refers to a broadcast on Al Jazeera before the network began operating later that year. He casts Maariv as an Israeli evening paper when it had long before switched to the morning. He gives an Israeli woman the unlikely first name of Sepha and a Palestinian boy the equally unlikely first name of Yahir. He gives a Palestinian village the most unlikely name of Jabal. Amir is described as eating tomatoes "with salt and savlik." What is savlik? But Lavigne knows how to evoke the volatile quest for meaning that affects so many in the Holy Land. As Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman of Jerusalem once suggested to me, taking the universe personally is "part of the thrill of living here, although it is also suffocating and overwhelming." It is just this kind of ambivalence that animates this mournful book. Ethan Bronner, the national legal affairs correspondent for The Times, was its Jerusalem bureau chief from 2008 to 2012.

Lavigne's second novel (after Not Me) confronts the moral questions surrounding religious extremism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The novel's literally explosive opening takes place in Jerusalem in 1996, as a bomb goes off outside renowned architect Roman Guttman's office, triggering a sort of fever dream that sends him into Palestinian territory and deep into memories of his communist youth in the U.S.S.R. Guttman narrates sections of the novel in language both vivid and disturbing. Also narrating is the suicide bomber, Amir Hamid, now dead, who has found in the afterlife not a martyr's reward but rather the curse of following Guttman through the desert and retracing his own youthful journey toward violent extremism. Finally, Guttman's 13-year-old daughter Anyusha, whose Zionist radical mother, Collette, died in a Soviet prison soon after giving birth, seeks answers of her own, revealing in diary form her attraction toward a messianic Jewish extremist group. Though some narrative digressions keep the novel from being truly elegant, Lavigne's heartfelt examination offers what reportage never could: an intensely intimate and humane depiction of the forces that unite and powerfully divide this region and its people. Agent: Michael V. Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.