The Book of Intimate Grammar, by David Grossman

...What's changed...

...His second, See...

...Under Love, was a spectacularly imaginative confrontation of the Holocaust whose last line is spectacularly simple- "We asked so little for a man to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war...

...Or, rather, he convinces himself that his affliction is a sign of moral supenonty...

...And it suffers for it Lacking the formal sophistication of his two previous novels, gnmly humorless, it is hobbled by a shrunken moral vision and, like its protagonist, seems merely stunned by the brutality of the world, prefernng censure and retreat to engagement The Book of Intimate Grammar is the story of Jerusalem's Aron Kleinman, whom we meet when he's eleven and follow until 1967, when he's fourteen...

...But Aron's problem is not that his fnends won't play with him It's that he's repulsed by the world He doesn't want to grow up...

...Grossman's first novel, The Smile of the Lamb, was a flawed but exciting book that took on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and tied its themes of power and betrayal to a love triangle and a most unusual hostage drama...

...We are told (though never credibly shown) that he was once a buoyant child whose imagination kept him and his fnends busy with elaborate games of make-believe His idol is Houdini, and he used to dazzle his pals with escapes But as his fnends gradually get pubic hair and smell different and start noticing girls, Aron remains, physically and emotionally, a child...

...Aron's response9 "To hell with you...

...To pine for the day, descnbed in the book of Isaiah, when lions will lie down with lambs, is not a particularly complex desire But to spin from that desire a mature and multivalent novel is just about as difficult as wnting gets...

...But, after the novel has been to the belly of the beast and back, that simple prayer becomes meaningful God may not hear it, but any sentient reader will...

...Robert Alter wrote, quite nghtly, about See: Under Love...

...PETER PAN IN ISRAEL THE BOOK OF INTIMATE GRAMMAR David Grossman Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22, 480 pp Paul Gediman In two previous novels, the Israeli writer David Grossman walked a high wire between sophistication and naivete, irony and earnestness...

...he decides to make a cat a vegetarian, wanting "to prove that you could prevent a cat from growing up carnivorous...

...screamed Aron savagely "To hell with all of you...

...He employed elaborate artistic gambits—complex structures, multiple narratives, the whole postmodern arsenal of fragmentation and misdirection—in the service of a prophetic moral vision...

...Lions and lambs, maybe...

...he would break into strange houses, and escape out of boxes and trunks and cars, he would stay as he was himself forever And so Aron decides to turn his affliction into an asset...

...It could well be one of the major novels of the post-World War II era, in a class with other phantasmagoric confrontations with contemporary history like The Tin Drum, A Hundred Years of Solitude, and Midnight's Children " Less sympathetic critics have descnbed Grossman's wnting as pretentious or excessive...

...he dreads the day when he will receive his father's shaving kit...

...I'll go in alone' All alone'" And he stood up and ran away...

...Later, in a funk over many things, including the fact that his puppy love, Yaeh, might be more interested in Gideon and that she may no longer be content with puppy love, Aron reflects that "having a body is itself a defect" This could be a poignant curse, but Aron's spirit is not com26 pelling or daring enough to make us care about how it strains against his mortal coil We just want him to grow up Near the end of the book, dunng his final confrontation with Gideon, Aron concocts an elaborate ruse (he says he's casting Gideon for a part in a movie—more childish makebelieve) to get his friend to take off his pants and show him his penis The problem with all this is that it's not written as farce or black comedy The prose is distinctively Grossman's, which is to say passionate and lyrical and breathless But his huge Wagnenan chords are a poor accompaniment to the small story He gives us tympani when what's called for is the brassy irony of a high hat Grossman gives us his prose, but he doesn't really give us history in The Book of Intimate Grammar And this is a departure for him Although the last part of the book takes place against the backdrop of Israel's preparation for the Six Day War, that backdrop is muted It's a thin thematic ligament that ties Aron's fear of maturity to what we know will happen to Israel after its military victory—or at any rate, to what we know from his nonfiction that Grossman thinks happened The youthful idealism of Zionism will become corrupted by the brutality of being an occupying power, the moral authority of a nation ingathered from the remnant survivors of the Holocaust will be compromised by Israel's emergence as just another nation-state that derives much of its authority from the barrel of a gun These are important themes, and there's nobody more qualified than Grossman to worry them through fiction But he doesn't here Perhaps Israeli readers don't require him to fill in the blanks the way American readers do But that doesn't change the fact that Grossman doesn't dramatize the connections between the mtenonty of his characters and the externality of history the way he did in his two earlier novels But it's important to note what The Book of Intimate Grammar shares with both the previous novels and his nonfiction {The Yellow Wind, about Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and Sleeping on a Wire, about Israeli Arabs) At the core of all his work is an abiding concern with the value of language In the "Bruno" section of See Under Love, just before he turns Bruno Schulz into a salmon, Grossman has him realize that "the Messiah would never come in writing, would never be invoked m a language suffering from elephantiasis A new grammar and a new calligraphy had first to be invented " The prophetic part of Grossman wants to tear through the veil of the everyday languages of conversation, politics, and commerce (and, no doubt, criticism, too) He wants to find modes of speech that are more truthful than the public tongue In some sense, all of his work is about conversation Grossman has shown that he can be brilliantly inventive in the ways he gets characters to talk to each other, and in the ways he rubs ideas and themes against one another to create fire The Book of Intimate Grammar does have its moments, and it teems with some beautiful discursive riffs on language and expression, but in the end the only durable conversation in the book is between Aron and himself And it's not enough ? 27...

...He finds a deck of pornographic playing cards and, unable to conceive of his father as a sexual being, convinces himself that someone is planting them in the house...

...Grossman's new novel is neither pretentious nor excessive...

...Explain one thing," he says to his best fnend, Gideon "I want to understand, because maybe I'm a little slow, so tell it to me straight, why did it used to be fun to sneak into a strange house two years ago and now suddenly it isn't anymore...

...It certainly is at times, particularly the "Bruno" section of See- Under Love, in which Grossman took the mid-century Polish-Jewish wnter, Bruno Schulz, and turned him into a Baltic salmon for nearly a hundred pages But in Grossman's case, the road of excess does occasionally lead to the palace of wisdom...

...Gideon says he doesn't know and then tells Aron that he has to get a hold of himself...

...Aron lives in a gnm apartment block with his coarse, blue-collar parents...