Nothing is as it seems - at least not for a couple of hundred pages - in David Grossman's lively picaresque novel, The Zigzag Kid (Bloomsbury, £14.99 in UK). Young Nonny, the hero/narrator, is only a week away from his Bar Mitzvah day and it seems Jacob, his widower father, and the kindly Gabi, who is determined to marry Jabob, are both intent on providing the boy with the definitive great adventure. Or are they? Could it be that other interested parties also have plans for the boy? And if they do, is harmless fun supposed to walk so close to crime and even danger?
Israel's David Grossman quick ly established himself as a major international fiction writer with the flamboyantly ambitious fourway narrative See Under: Love (1990), his first novel to be published in English. It draws heavily on the real-life death camp experiences of the Polish writer Bruno Schultz, an important source and influence for Grossman. Such was the success of See Under: Love, which was compared with the work of Grass and Marquez, that within a year, his daring debut, The Smile of the Lamb, originally published in Israel in 1983, appeared in an English translation. Less experimental, the latter is a brave novel, brilliant and enduring, the first in Hebrew literature to deal with the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Before the publication of his novels, Grossman was well-known in the West as an unusually balanced commentator on the Middle East through books such as The Yellow Wind (1988), his study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His disappointing third novel, The Book of Intimate Grammar (1994), is, like See Under: Love, haunted by the Holocaust, and though less ambitious in terms of technique and narrative than his earlier books, proved a somewhat convoluted exercise in continuous stream of consciousness. The Zigzag Kid is not only fresh and lively, it breaks free of all of his previous influences, unless one includes Lewis Carroll.
Having been escorted to the train station, young Nonny is bracing himself for a visit to grouchy Uncle Samuel, "the great educator". Lounging in the train carriage, lying on the seat "with my feet in the air", Nonny begins to see himself as a prisoner. From the outset the tone is light and humorous, wistful and cunning (the Jerusalem-based American translator Betsy Rosenberg has again served Grossman well, possibly even better than in her earlier translations of his work).
The world evoked is that of a young boy's. Grossman straight away communicates the fact that his boy hero is imaginative and somewhat solitary; he is also knowing. His mother died when he was a baby, leaving his father dependent on his secretary, Gabi, who quickly stepped in as a housekeeper/mother figure. Gabi is devoted to the boy; she is also fantastically fat, hence, or so Nonny suspects, his father's lack of romantic interest. As the journey begins he is aware that Gabi has given his father an ultimatum. Either he changes, or she leaves. As Nonny realises, "she wanted me out of the way so she could spilt with Dad".
The boyish defiance doesn't conceal his anxiety. Pondering the impending loss of his old life, Nonny becomes desperate enough to be ready to pull the emergency stop lever when a policeman and a prisoner walk into the carriage. Nonny is not a policeman's son for nothing: his father has taught him to see and observe. He watches the pair as they enact their own little drama. Then Nonny discovers a letter ad dressed to himself. The only clue the boy is given is to put the question "who am I?" The narrative continues apace with Nonny meeting up with a strange old man; Felix is an exotic, elegant figure and would appear to be the ideal mentor for a potentially wild boy.
Old Felix certainly has plans. He leads Nonny through a series of crazy escapades involving stolen cars, lavish meals, colourful disguises and his own flair for the unexpected. Gabi's obsession with a famous actress has resulted in the boy spending hours standing outside the woman's home as Gabi waits for a glimpse. Through Felix, Nonny comes face to face with Gabi's heroine. As the narrative unfolds, the personality of Nonny's long-dead mother, who had planned to die at the age of 26 - and did - emerges. Various mysteries materialise, take over briefly, and then are solved.
The Zigzag Kid is a coming of age novel without the expected self-absorption. Nonny not only learns about the life his parents once led, but also is given a legacy and a bizarre family history. Grossman sustains both his young narrator's bewilderment and that of his reader through a wonderfully multi-layed, tangled plot. Although the older Nonny is looking back on the bizarre events leading up to his Bar Mitzvah, he never loses the wonder and confusion he felt. There are also vivid set-piece digressions, such as Nonny's misadventures when his desire to be a matador lead him into trouble with a local man's cow. The narrative dazzles not through special effects or technique, but through the art of storytelling.
It has taken Israel's other major international writer, Amos Oz, a long time to arrive at the lightness of touch he displays in Fima and subsequent novels such as Don't Call It Night and, recently, Pan- ther in the Basement. David Grossman has achieved this in a far shorter period of time. The Zigzag Kid is an engaging, lively, deft and ultimately moving performance by an imaginative and original writer. Few novels of 1997 will charm and beguile as much.