A fractured family seeks sense of hope

Over the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, an Israeli couple spends a week apart: the husband at home, tending to his elevator business, his children, and his grandchildren, and the wife in Tanzania, visiting her widower brother-in-law in order to properly mourn for her beloved sister. The wife, sitting in an airport terminal, blankly turns the pages of a novel that promises that an "elusive secret only implied at the outset will by the end turn everything upside down."

At first, A. B. Yehoshua's scrupulous interest in the mundane details of a single week in the lives of Amotz and Daniela Ya'ari indicates that this is precisely not that kind of novel. And yet, as we delve ever deeper into the hidden intricacies of "Friendly Fire," whose title alone indicates a multiplicity of meanings, it becomes clear that what had at first seemed a return to the Faulknerian cacophony of competing voices heard in his earlier novel "A Late Divorce" is in fact a sequel to Yehoshua's 2006 novel "A Woman in Jerusalem." Here, too, as in that novel about a mysterious woman killed in a suicide bombing, death is an equation with no possibility of solution.

Daniela treks to Tanzania to better understand the last moments of her sister's life - the market stall where she first took ill, and the clinic where she died. Instead, her trip becomes a journey inside the mind of her brother-in-law Yirmi, whose mourning for his wife has been overshadowed by the mourning for his son, killed in a senseless "friendly fire" military accident while patrolling in the West Bank.

Yirmi, whose name is taken from the prophet Jeremiah, has become a prophet of sorts in his African exile. He immediately snatches away Daniela's Israeli newspapers, and her Hanukkah candles, and thrusts them directly into the fire. Everything is to be subject to the flames, including the cremated remains of his wife ("none of us, after all, believes in the resurrection of the dead," he explains) and the shreds of his belief in the state of Israel, wiped away in the accident that stole his son. Yirmi insists on "disengagement and separation" from family and country - ironically charged words for any follower of the news from Israel, associated, respectively, with Ariel Sharon's unilateral departure from the Gaza Strip and the security wall built between Israel and the West Bank.

But perhaps we are penetrating too rapidly, too effortlessly into the heart of the mystery Yehoshua has laid out for us. Symbolically freighted as the book may be, "Friendly Fire" is crammed with tangible pleasures: the elephant with the weeping eye Daniela visits, the elevators with the mysterious wailing noises Amotz inspects, the menorahs made of old shell casings and miniature elevators. Yehoshua's fire does not just burn; it also caresses. The friendly fire takes on many forms - military calamity, the horror of occupation, the anger directed at those we know love us too dearly to shoot back - but ultimately it is as precise a definition as Yehoshua cares to proffer of the agonies and ecstasies of family.

One family, the Ya'aris, makes it through a challenging week of separation, revelation, and confrontation, clinging to each other to keep away despair. Another family, the family of Israelis, takes another battering in a series of debilitating blows, and it is unclear how many more can be borne. The brotherhood of bereaved fathers, their sons sacrificed to the god of war, ask for little more than peace, and release. "I am seventy years old, Daniela," Yirmi pleads with his sister-in-law, his words coming to serve as a valedictory for this fine novel of loss and hope, "and I am permitted to let go."

Saul Austerlitz is the author of "Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video From the Beatles to the White Stripes."