418
PARTISAN REVIEW
the fixity of identity which is so insisted upon in a country where every–
one is either one thing or another. He is a distruster of affiliations who has
always looked for news stories that "exposed depravity and duplicity on
both sides of supposedly sacred struggles. He found such stories reassuring,
an affirmation of the universal human spirit. Lucas desperately preferred
almost anything to blood and soil, ancient loyalty, timeless creeds." Yet
what he wants to report this time is the "Jerusalem syndrome," i.e., the
way so many who come there are persons roused to states of visionary
craziness whether or not they are veritable majnoon, madmen or mad–
women.
It
is a project to challenge detachment to the utmost.
Lucas is a little shadowy, less interesting to the reader than hi s per–
ceptions where there is so much to see. Though he is more intelligent,
more temperate, more humane than most of those he meets, the drama of
the book lies mostly outside him or simply sweeps him along. The novel–
ist tries to give some poignancy to his anguish of disbelief (at one point
he pounds desperately on the door of a closed church in sudden need of
God). But he remains one of those who may be the best but who "lack all
conviction," as Yeats wrote in "The Second Coming," "while the worst
are full of passionate intensity." Even his relation with Sonia Barnes, the
beautiful mixed-race nightclub singer from New York with whom he is in
love, threads fitfully though the novel's crowded pages and ends as it began
in the irreconcilability of skepticism and faith. Sonia, a convert
to
Sufism
whose parents had been New York Communists in the thirties, remains a
believer in an apocalyptic future that excl udes him.
What is strongest in this ambitious novel is its rendition of the city of
Jerusalem. In a stunning opening we follow Lucas after his glance at the
Jerusalem Post:
"A border policeman had been stabbed in the Nuseirat camp
in the Gaza Strip but was expected
to
recover. Three Palestinians had been
shot to death by Shin Bet hit squads, one in Rafah, two in Gaza City.
Haredim
in Jerusalem had demonstrated against the Hebrew Universi ty's
archaeological dig near the Dung Gate; ancient Jewish burial sites were
being uncovered...." He takes a morning walk on Easter Sunday, the six–
teenth day of Nisan, the day after the onset of Passover, passing through
the interlaced streets into the ancient Old City, pressing through the
crowds, encountering acquaintances, hearing rumors. Such itineraries
repeat themselves as we meet and meet again the major characters and the
many minor figures who people the novel, and, leaving Lucas's side from
time to time, we follow some of them into their own lives.
It is the time of the Intifada, and the Gaza Strip is seething with skir–
mishes between the settlers and Palestinians. In the Jerusalem office of Dr.
Pinchas Obermann, two patients meet-Raziel Melker, a gifted but precari–
ously balanced ex-junkie jazz musician, and Adam de Kuff, a "bipolar"
