Accidents: A Novel [Hardcover]

This novel follows the coming together as a family of Yonatan Luria, a novelist with writer's block since the death of his wife, Ilana, in a mundane auto accident; his daughter, Dana, dealing with not just the loss of her mother but the early onset of puberty; and Shira Klein, also a novelist with writer's block and a woman who has never quite learned how to be loved. Its almost onmniscient narrator follows not just their feelings, but more importantly their memories, which seem to come to them at odd moments fully-formed like the packets of information that float over the internet. Yonatan and Shira meet at the home of Dana's friend Tamar and her mother Rona (Tamar has no father, just an anonymous sperm donor) and we follow in minute detail as they slowly fall in love, Shira moves in with the Lurias, Dana withdraws into a shell, Shira begins to write again, Yonatan gives up writing entirely and becomes a lecturer, Dana and Shira develop a warm relationship that is not mother-daugher and Shira's father slowly withers and dies. In the end, we know that the future for this family will be good and loving, but will include repeats of the moments when Shira confronts her father's death and Yonatan sees his mother growing old, because that is the way of the world.

Two things stand out: first, these are real people, not Hollywood type characters. They smell, they sweat, they smoke, they eat fatty foods. They wear old sweatshirts and underwear that has lost its shape and color. Yonatan is never seen without his green Chuck Taylors. They drive beater cars and struggle to afford digital thermometers, not Manolo Blahniks. Second, Hedaya is a painstakingly patient writer. She will take pages to describe a few moments, such as the first time when Yonatan takes Shira's hand and how for each of them the whole world disappears outside the place where their hands meet. In a single sentence, she will describe two different people's emotions, and then depart immediately into the full story of, say, Dana's day when her mother died, because it was at that point in the story that she remembers it. Dialogue, detail, description are all spot on.

It is impossible to understand this novel without understanding its political context, which is that it does not allow politics to intervene. The novel is set in Israel, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem mainly, but this is not the Israel you will see on television, read about in the New York Times or hear Pat Robertson sermonize about. They are not hasidim, do not live on kibbutzes or in settlements on the West Bank. They are secular Jews (Yonatan buys bacon along with steak at his butcher), urban and urbane, living in Israel because that is their home. Ilana did not die in a suicide bombing, but in a car accident. Palestinians are mentioned just twice in the whole book, once when Yonatan lists terrorist acts as among the things he worries about when Dana is off on her own, and once when he follows a Palestinian taxi, without incident, through a traffic jam on the highway from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. No one talks about this Israel, but it is the Israel of millions of men, women and children, living lives, falling in love, getting sick and having tragedies, the same as anyone else. Hedaya is to be commended for writing such a wonderful story about such people, without using the usual crutches of books set in this place and time.

That this story is set in Tel Aviv is interesting. As another reviewer noted, it carefully avoids the political yet the charged climate surrounding the characters is something the reader feels and searches for throughout the entire novel. This is one of the best novels I've read in the last 5 years. The author takes on a great challenge attempting to portray love that is not grounded in a unique setting, rather a living city that could be any city in any country. This story is not "the Israeli love story," and that's very important for the English-speaking readers to grasp.
Aside from the lofty position the author takes in crafting her story, the story itself offers vivid glimpses at such a beautiful and painful story. Many sections of the books had strokes of genius. Her characters, Rona and Shira especially, are so likeable and intricate that it was hard to finish the novel and I purposefully took my time.
I commend Hedaya's novel and her talent at story telling. She captures, in my mind, the post-modern writter of our time and is truly gifted in her work. I would love to learn more about how she worked with the translator to preserve the images and story line so precisely.
I highly recommend this book to all my friends!

This is one of those few novels in which we learn about ourselves. Hedaya moves beyond the brilliant and heart-wrenching sketches in Housebreaking to write an astonishingly intimate novel. Here she brings to life three characters: a 10 year-old girl, a woman in her late 30s, and a man in his mid-40s. For each one, she captures every shade of their changing emotional states and their perception of the world. The exhausting and exhilarating doubt of a first flirtation, the way people falling in love let their imagination detail a shared future even as they rack up the disappointments of discovery, are kneaded into form by Hedaya's sure prose. While the original Hebrew is (I've been told) so studied and inventive as to be strenuous reading and (in the words of one reviewer) "morbid", in Americanized translation it becomes rich and accessible. The character's relationship with their bodies and the physicality of others is so true to reality it is almost invasive, and the universal and terrible situation of watching one's parents grow old is described so accurately that the reader recalls living or dead parents. Hedaya occasionally uses little scenes of novelistic invention to bring us closer to the characters - as when Yonatan empties the glove compartment of his car, or Dana watches her friend getting dressed. There isn't a wasted section of this novel, and it ends only when the reader knows the characters intimately enough to continue the story in his or her own head.

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