Sam Sacks on the Best New Fiction A riveting Israeli thriller by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sam-sacks-on-the-best-new-fiction-1487962264
Even readers who didn’t manage to plow to the end of Tom Wolfe’s 1987 “The Bonfire of the Vanities” remember the novel’s crackerjack opening, in which a Manhattan yuppie and his mistress driving from the airport strike and kill a young black man and then flee the scene. Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, operating on the sound theory that good premises don’t need fixing, begins “Waking Lions” (Little, Brown, 341 pages, $26) with another hit and run. While speeding through the Negev Desert on his way home from work, neurosurgeon Eitan Green kills an Eritrean immigrant. He thinks there are no witnesses and drives away. But the next morning the dead man’s wife, Sirkit, knocks on his door bearing the wallet he left behind.
The drama that plays out between “the extorted and the extorter” takes an unexpected shape. Instead of demanding money for her silence, Sirkit forces Eitan to spend his nights working at a makeshift clinic for undocumented African migrants. To keep the exhausting arrangement secret Eitan concocts an elaborate set of lies to tell his wife, Liat, who happens to be a police detective investigating—you guessed it—his hit and run.
Ms. Gundar-Goshen turns floodlights on Israel’s unseen corners. Liat gradually exposes a drug trafficking ring involving the head of a kibbutz, local Bedouins and Sirkit’s husband. Eitan, meanwhile, is confronted by otherwise invisible masses of ailing, destitute Eritreans and Sudanese. Compelled to tend to them against his will yet increasingly ensnared by the extremity of their need, his connection to this shadow population is a compound of guilt, resentment and compassion: “Just as the smell of blood drove sharks mad, the smell of weakness made him furious. Or maybe it was the opposite, and it wasn’t that he had the power to destroy them that made him angry at them but the clever way they destroyed him. The way their wretchedness oppressed him, accused him.”
“Waking Lions,” in a propulsive translation from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, yokes a crime story to thorny ethical issues in ways reminiscent of Donna Tartt and Richard Price. Its motor doesn’t always purr—the sections in the middle unpacking Eitan and Liat’s troubled marriage are laborious. But it’s a rare book that can trouble your conscience while holding you in a fine state of suspense.
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