Journey to the Son
Fiction and fact collide head-on in David Grossman’s To the End of the Land. Impact occurs immediately after the last page of the novel, in a brief, untitled note: The author steps forward, strips off the armor of make-believe and informs us that his younger son, Uri, serving in the Israel Defense Forces, was killed on August 12, 2006, “in the final hours of the Second Lebanon War.” The news would be tragic under any circumstances; as a coda to a 600-page novel about a woman who’s convinced that her younger son, also serving in the IDF, is about to be killed in action, it’s devastating.
How much of the emotional force of the fiction is owed to fact? Impossible to say. Many people will begin the book, as I did, already knowing about the death of the author’s son. That Grossman succeeds in loosening the grip of that terrible knowledge (I didn’t forget it, exactly, but I was able to put it out of my mind) is a testament to his seductive storytelling. He made me believe in an invented world where other outcomes were still conceivable. (In an earlier novel, See Under: Love, Grossman pulled off the remarkable trick of convincing me that instead of being slaughtered in the Drohobych ghetto, Bruno Schulz, the great Polish Jewish writer, jumped into the Baltic Sea and became a salmon.)
Grossman’s new novel is dominated by its volatile heroine, Ora, the woman who’s certain that her son will soon be dead. A magnificent creation, radiantly alive and dangerously changeable, Ora steals the show. Like most people, she indulges in magical thinking; unlike most people, she allows magical thinking to determine her actions, even to shape her existence. When her son Ofer volunteers for an unspecified military campaign (the present tense of the novel is the spring of 2000 in the midst of the second intifada—after Israel’s mid-1990s plague of suicide bombings, but before 9/11 turned terrorism into a global preoccupation), she decides that by avoiding notification of his death, she can keep him alive. It’s an absurd idea (especially since Ofer isn’t dead)—and yet, to live in Ora’s world, to be immersed in the complexities of her personal history and the complementary complexities of daily life in divided, embattled Israel, is to begin to dare to hope that her impossible strategy (“She will be the first notification-refusenik”) might possibly succeed: If she isn’t home to hear the bad news, whatever it is won’t happen.
She flees Jerusalem, leaving behind her cell phone, and sets off on a hike in the Galilee, vowing to stay away until Ofer is safely home. Accompanying her, more or less against his will, is Avram, whom she’s known and loved and been loved by for more than 30 years. As they walk through the spring landscape, we learn all about Ora and her tattered family life, about Ofer and his older brother, about her estranged husband, Ilan. We also learn about Avram: He and Ilan and Ora are three sides of a romantic triangle, a messy, unresolved affair that began when they all met as teenagers in a hospital isolation ward during the 1967 Six-Day War. Eventually we learn that Avram is Ofer’s biological father, though they’ve never laid eyes on each other. As Ora puts it, “We’re really a complicated case.”
As a young man, Avram was talented and effusive, full of fierce artistic ambition. Then he was captured by the Egyptians during the Yom Kippur War and tortured, cruelly and repeatedly. At the start of his hike with Ora, decades after his horrific ordeal, he’s still a badly damaged person. Somewhat implausibly, walking and talking have a dramatic therapeutic effect on him. Soon he and Ora begin to feel the old sexual tremors—as though the whole walk (they’re following the “Israel Trail”) weren’t already fizzing with tension.
To the End of the Land isn’t plotted so much as spooled out, a bright ribbon of words that builds up a portrait of a woman splendidly composed of contradictory elements: ignorance, wisdom, generosity, neediness, impatience, endurance, cowardice, courage. Grossman only rarely provides objective information about Ora; mostly he lets her define herself through the stories she tells, and through the thoughts and memories those stories provoke.
Ora spiels ceaselessly, bombarding Avram with family anecdotes. She wants to tell him about Ofer, “all the minutiae about him, the fullness of his life.” Avram, appalled by the idea of paternity and always adamantly opposed to any involvement with this son he has never met, gradually relents, asking her to “start from a distance.” Her tale (“a eulogy for the family that once was, that will never be again”) is therefore circuitous. “It’s a bit like describing how a river flows, she realizes. Like painting a whirlwind, or flames. It’s an occurrence, she thinks… A family is a perpetual occurrence.”
This restless novel resembles a hiker’s progress along a trail; the narrative is literally peripatetic. Some of the frequent flashbacks are extensive, and Grossman shifts in and out of omniscience, in and out of various characters’ heads. But he always circles back to Ora, back to her dreadful premonition about Ofer—because the inescapable background of her story, as omnipresent as the lovingly sketched landscape, is Israel and its impossible situation, a militarized nation making enemies by the minute. (Ora’s relationship with the sole Arab character in the novel is in shreds even before she sets foot on her journey.)
Explosions of intense writing, zeroing in on moments of anguish and embarrassment, of animal lust and weepy happiness, of unwelcome intuition and craven fear, demonstrate Grossman’s ample talent. Some passages are gorgeous, such as Ora’s memory of the split-second after Ofer’s first steps: “The soft, padded bump as his diaper hit the rug. The heavy head rocking back and forth. The insult at being surprised in this way, and then the wonderment on his face as he turned to her, only to her, as though asking her to interpret what he had just done.” There are lapses, too, such as Ora’s unfortunate lament about her body shape: “[T]hey made her thighs too thick, completely disproportionate, to say nothing of her ass, which this year, with all her desperate binge-eating, had really reared its head.” That particular slip could be the translator’s fault—but alas, it’s not the only one.
A warm-hearted, sensitive, intelligent book, To the End of the Land is a faithful reflection of the author’s life-loving, unabashed maximalism. In the face of war, intractable internal conflict and personal tragedy, David Grossman has retained his faith in the generous notion that if only a person’s humanity can be fully grasped—so that you feel it and taste it—there’s
still hope.
Adam Begley is the former books editor of the New York Observer. He is currently at work on a biography of John Updike.
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