PORTRAIT OF DEBBIE

A surprising mystery awaits an American writer at the site of an Israeli archaeological dig in this novel.

When author Reuben Headey visits the Tel Ronish archaeological site outside Haifa, he’s given a tour of the “heterogeneous lot” assembled there. The group is made up of “a paradigm of nationalities, ethnic diversities, bound by the project at hand for whatever reason personal or professional” that brought each member to the dig. In that lot is freelance photographer Deborah Rosenfeld, an attractive, free-spirited, “almost famous” professional who has worked all over the world and is now tasked with shooting the site. “We are all actors, us humans. We play many parts,” Deborah muses. “Even those of us who are ostensibly whom we were purported to be at the outset. Chameleons to a one.” Unbeknown to Reuben, Deborah is an expert on chameleons. Years ago, he knew her as his young cousin Debbie, who had a crush on him before being presumed dead in a car crash. Now, as she stubbornly tells herself, “I’m Deborah Rosenfeld, the only me I am now, as I have long been,” a 30-something woman who has “grown hardened to a certain extent, with steel-string muscles in more ways than one, beneath still soft curves and a wild mane of wavy hair.” As Reuben settles into life at the dig and on the kibbutz, the novelist and Deborah start getting to know each other. She tells him about her wide-ranging career, and he tells her about his writing—and about his girlfriend, Rebecca, waiting for him back in America. Despite the obvious conflicting issues involved, Deborah begins to fall in love all over again with Reuben.

Thrift’s depictions of communal life on the Tel Ronish site and at the kibbutz are richly atmospheric, from the minutiae of day-to-day life (the food, the weather, the routine) to the larger loyalties that drive the crew. But his characters are less credible, most seriously Reuben and Deborah. Readers will be unconvinced that Reuben wouldn’t instantly identify Deborah as Debbie, regardless of how long it’s been or what he thinks really happened to her teenage self. A major character’s failure to recognize somebody is a tired plot device. And even when the narrative is at its most compelling, the author often delivers cluttered, cloggy prose, as in this passage about Debbie and her foster father: “In short, I don’t think he had a clue about what made her tick, and that he was merely projecting his own self-serving fantasy of an explanation upon what might have been just an above-average teenage girl’s angst at her age, that given what she’d experienced, had come through being all the more acute, let’s say.” Deborah has very consciously crafted an identity for herself that’s quite different from the awkward teen Reuben knew. She doesn’t immediately tell him her real identity (“Spying on one’s past was fraught enough with the danger of stepping on emotional landmines”). Yet she’s willing to threaten Reuben’s relationship with Rebecca, which will largely collapse many readers’ sympathies.

An intriguing but uneven tale of love and a new identity.