Short Bursts of Sentiment

Etgar Keret is without doubt the Israeli writer under 50 years of age best known in America. Whether he is also, as the novelist Stephen Marche speculated he may be in the Forward, “the most important writer working in Israel right now,” remains a matter for dispute: Aharon Appelfeld, David Grossman, Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and Natan Zach also stand in contention for that title. But Mr. Keret is young (or youngish); he works, intriguingly, in other media (graphic novels, children’s books), and Mr. Marche’s enthusiasm is understandable. Mr. Keret’s stories — at least those that have appeared in English — seem as though they were written explicitly to please American tastes, just as much as his status as a mild exotic and his multimedia ventures seem almost contrived to do.The stories are zany, lexically meager, and brief. “The Girl on the Fridge” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 171 pages, $12) collects 46 of them, the longest of which run only to four pages. Their themes — discernible not so much through expression as accretion — also seem designed to entrance America’s spiritless consumers of fiction: failed relationships, violence both physical and moral, the banal beauty of resignation and despair, and the vague, magical persistence of hope.And there is no question that, within the rigid limits he has set himself, Mr. Keret excels. But those limits are precisely the problem. Take, for example, “Sidewalks,” perhaps the best story in the new collection. It begins with an anonymous narrator in a cemetery, observing, a week late, the anniversary of a friend’s death. He reflects on an evening they spent together, in which he kept catching his drunken friend just before his head smashed into the concrete of a sidewalk. (They “scored an amazing twenty-one to nothing” against the sidewalks, in Mr. Keret’s phrase.) The memory dissolves; a group of children play a game with the gravestones, bouncing balls off of them and scoring points based on the military rank of the deceased beneath each stone. After asking the narrator about the meaning of the rank on his friend’s stone, the children begin chanting:“We beat the gravestones! We beat the gravestones!” and the two of them started jumping and yelling like they’d just taken the world championship, or even better.“Sidewalks” is a compelling story, until we reach its saccharine ending, which dissolves entirely the tense, desperate joy conjured up by the image of two young men reeling, drunken and vulnerable, through city streets at night. But this is Mr. Keret’s method: to draw the absurd from the quotidian, only to round it off into a kind of sentimental confusion.The method does not vary. Each story in “The Girl on the Fridge” — even those that bring forward Mr. Keret’s darker absurdism — follows this track. “Hat Trick,” about a birthday magician whose top hat holds a number of unpleasant surprises, becomes a plaint about the sad state of art in the modern world. “The Geshternak,” a tale about a shapeless and invisible creature that lives under the narrator’s bed — and subsists by eating his dreams — resolves into a sad, melodic homily on the fulfillment of the downtrodden. Mr. Keret skirts terra incognita, and even manages at times to suggest that he has returned from the bourn of some undiscovered, unfathomable country. But he disavows the disturbances he has created along the way by reducing them to familiar ethical trivia.Nowhere is this more evident than when he takes up contemporary politics, an inescapable focus of Israeli literature. Novelists are usually their most recognizable selves when writing on political subjects: Their personality obtrudes most visibly and their flaws and failings are caught in the harshest possible light. Mr. Keret’s unhinged, whimsical sensibility might induce a hope, in the serious reader, that he would be able to write in a new way about Israeli-Palestinian relations, the intifada, the ever-repeated collapse of what is called the peace process, and the bizarrerie of global political opinion on these matters. But, in stories such as “Not Human Beings,” “Vaccum Seal,” “Quanta,” and “Moral Something,” Mr. Keret demonstrates that, for all his unconventional tactics, he clings instead to a familiar and even timeworn narrative of Israeli brutality and perfidy counterpoised with the noble-savage innocence he bestows on the Palestinians:“The mute’s all hopped up today,” Zanzuri said with a snicker. “Did you see how he sent the towelhead flying?” Stein, not understanding exactly what had happened, turned and saw the body on the sidewalk, saw Zanzuri laughing and the Russian chewing gum. … The Russian grabbed Stein from behind with an iron grip and pulled him away from the mute. “He didn’t run over a human being,” Zanzuri corrected. “He ran over an Arab, so what the f– is your problem?” Stein felt the Russian’s repulsive, hot breath on his neck and knew that if he opened his mouth to say something he’d burst out crying.This, from “Not Human Beings,” is undercut by the fact that the “Arab” in question turns out to be a sort of piñata filled with “rolled-up flags, flyers, candy, and phone tokens” — remind me: who is doing the brutalizing here, Israeli soldiers or Mr. Keret? — and further undercut by Mr. Keret’s coy suggestion that the episode may have been a dream. But these complicated literary props only serve to frame the timid, triangulating moral imagination that animates Mr. Keret’s fiction, and which hides beneath his arresting and grotesque talent for tableaux.Mr. Munson is online editor of Commentary.

Short Bursts of Sentiment

Short Bursts of Sentiment

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