Soul Searching in the Holy Land

Defining the slippery category of literary fiction is arguably a fool’s errand, not only because every so often someone (most recently, and most tediously, Lee Siegel) eagerly declares it dead, but because there’s inevitable disagreement over precisely which duties a novel must perform in order to qualify. Nevertheless, as that famous line about pornography goes, I know it when I see it, and Wherever You Go, the new Israel-set novel by Joan Leegant, is most certainly not it. The reason I bother to emphasize this is that the novel, her debut, carries the trappings of literary-ness so overtly: it’s published in a tastefully designed hardcover (featuring a photograph of a woman’s slender figure ascending some stone steps in Jerusalem’s Old City); it boasts a hyperbolic blurb by author and critic Jonathan Wilson, who references Chekhov and draws a comparison with Philip Roth; the story, promises the jacket copy, encompasses the Very Important Themes of religious extremism and Middle East politics; there are epigraphs from the Bible and Shakespeare; Leegant, the bio reveals, won awards including the PEN New England for her first book (a collection of short stories), used to teach writing at Harvard and, should you require further convincing, gives thanks for residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo in her opening acknowledgments. So you can imagine my disappointment when Wherever You Go, which follows the ultimately entwined fates of three soul-searching American Jews in Israel, turned out to have about as much psychological depth, moral complexity and political nuance as an episode of 24.  Read the rest @ The Nervous Breakdown.