A vocal member of the disaffected Left in a country constantly straining under the pressures of political conflict, Mr. Yehoshua is acutely conscious of political issues in his work, but his deepest imaginative concerns lie elsewhere; and the delicate shifting tensions between political surface and what I would call elemental depths are a principal source of his fiction's piquancy, its elusive, haunting appeal.

The surface of "The Lover" would seem to justify describing it straightforwardly as a novel of the Yom Kippur War and its aftermath. The story, in a technique possibly suggested by Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," is told through the alternating monologues of six central characters: Adam, a prosperous middle-aged Haifa garage-owner; Asya, his wife; Gabriel, her young lover, who has returned from a decade abroad to be swept up in the October war; Dafi, the teen-age daughter of Adam and Asya; Na'im, a young Arab worker at Adam's garage, who falls in love with Dafi; and Veducha, Gabriel's nonagenarian grandmother. When the war is over, Gabriel is missing in action, and the governing force of the plot is Adam's obsessive search for his wife's vanished lover.

As several Hebrew reviewers were quick to point out, Mr. Yehoshua's novel manages to touch most of the raw nerves of Israel's troubled national condition…. Mr. Yehoshua is keenly concerned about all [Israel's problems], but in his novel they are ultimately the means of dramatizing a more fundamental thematic interplay between youth and age, potency and impotence, living and dying, sleep and waking.

The addictive allure of sleep in fact has been an explicit theme of Mr. Yehoshua's since his earliest short stories, and in "The Lover" that theme is orchestrated through the various monologues with impressive resourcefulness. This is, indeed, a somnambulistic novel. One of the six protagonists, Asya, is actually always asleep when the narrative shifts to her point of view: All her monologues are reports of her dreams. Adam glides through the streets in his tow truck night after night, often in a daze of fatigue, searching for Gabriel, joined by his daughter Dafi, a precocious insomniac who snatches fragments of fitful sleep in her high-school classes during the day. And Veducha's first monologues, surely the most remarkable poetic achievement of the novel, are the asyntactical expression of the old lady's flickering consciousness in a coma as she imagines herself a stone, a root, a branch, a plant, something almost dead blindly clinging to life.

Even from this rapid summary of a novel rich in the ramification of incident and character, it should be apparent that Mr. Yehoshua is not in any conventional sense a realistic writer. His early stories were characterized by a certain self-consciousness about symbolic mechanisms and surrealistic effects. What he seems to have learned how to do adeptly from his second book onward was to make the familiar world, rendered in realistic detail, imperceptibly merge with or suddenly collapse into the uncanny, and that is one of the chief strengths of "The Lover." The social types and settings, the political attitudes and conflicts, the public institutions represented in the novel often seem persuasively like those of Israel, 1973, but they obey their own spectral laws. The informing vision is grotesque and, often enough, grotesquely comic, because that matches the writer's sense of the fundamental bizarreness of living as a human being, hurtling from youth through age to death, spurred by lust and numbed by its fading away, trying to get a sight on reality, perhaps obscurely aspiring to something.

Thus, Gabriel's first entry into the arena of Adam's life is like a stage-farce transposition of a dream. (p. 15)

Other instances of Mr. Yehoshua's grotesque vision are less comic than deeply unsettling, like the moment when the hitherto sexually apathetic Adam, inflamed with sudden lust, makes love to a Lolita-like schoolchum of his daughter on the iron bed of an operating room in a geriatric hospital. It is hardly a pleasant moment and not, by any realistic standard, a likely one, but in its juxtaposition of child and man, the act of life in a place of the dying, carnal warmth and the chill of surgical steel, it perfectly expresses Mr. Yehoshua's vision of life as a tangle of weird contradictions. He is a writer who exhibits the rigorous fidelity to his own perceptions that produces real originality. (p. 46)