THE LOVER

The love affair between a Canadian grad student and an Israeli soldier grows increasingly complicated.

Sacks’ latest novel begins with a deceptively simple premise: A young woman falls passionately in love with an even younger man. Allison is a grad student visiting Israel from Canada; Eyal is on the verge of invading Gaza. She’s 27; he’s 19. At first, the story seems basic to the point of cliché. But Sacks quickly veers into territory much more troubling and complex. Just as Eyal is beginning to question the Israeli army’s actions in Gaza—and, by extension, his own—Allison is learning to silence her own questions. “I was finding that I liked myself better in Hebrew,” she tells us, “a language in which I had so much less to say.” Allison’s family, we learn, isn’t close—she and her sister have grown apart, and her parents are distant. In Israel, on the other hand, she finds herself fully embraced by both Eyal’s family and the country at large: “Nothing in my whole life had ever felt as good as being welcomed not just into a family but into a people,” she says. What’s most disturbing in this brilliantly rendered book is not the age difference between the lovers, not the war, but the way that Allison gradually learns to manipulate her own thoughts. “I could say to myself, ‘That was racist’; saying Death to Arabs is racist—but also,” she thinks, “I understood the feelings behind the words.” Desperate to belong, Allison engages in increasingly pliable mental gymnastics to justify her thoughts and actions. Sacks’ depiction of those mental gymnastics is astounding. Sometimes, it’s true, Sacks can be heavy-handed, repeating explicitly what is already implicitly clear. But this is a minor complaint. As a whole, the book—and Allison’s transformation—is deeply unsettling, and Sacks’ talent as a novelist who takes on thorny, multifaceted, unanswerable questions is clearly unmatched.

A brilliantly rendered novel raises crucial questions about identity, justice, war, and belonging.