My Michael (1968)

In his introduction to this new edition of My Michael, written more than 40 years after the book's original appearence, Amos Oz describes how Hannah, his intelligent, bored and increasingly unstable narrator, would "dictate" the words that make up her story to him as he sat in the cramped lavatory of his kibbutz home, writing late into the night.

Hannah tells of how she met Michael, an unassuming geology student who becomes her husband, and of their life in Jerusalem in the 50s. They are both young – too young – and are not emotionally prepared for marriage. Limited financially, lonely and uninterested in her immediate world, Hannah is forced to abandon her study of literature while Michael goes on, in his prosaic way, to become a university lecturer and to fight in the Arab-Israeli war.

It is not, perhaps, a book to read for its plot. What stands out, rather, is Oz's strident lyricism as Hannah's bipolar tendencies take her in and out of feverish fantasies about a pair of twins she knew in her youth. In her imaginings, the three of them are warriors against an unnamed enemy, playing violently in the desert and the sea. These passages are tucked in among descriptions of mundane reality, which Oz vividly conveys.

"My Michael" is anything but a provincial achievement; it has nothing to do with noble kibbutzim, Sten guns and sabras, nor with the Talmudic dryness of Israel's Nobel Prize-winner, the late S. Y. Agnon. It's quite the last kind of book one expects from a young writer living in the midst of a melodramatic political situation, for "My Michael" is an extremely self-conscious and serious psychological novel, slow, thoughtful, self-assured and highly sophisticated, full of the most skillful modulations of tone and texture. On the surface it is very much what used to be called a "women's novel"--the story of a disintegrating marriage told from the unhappy wife's point of view. In a way it's a modern Israeli "Madame Bovary," a finely wrought portrait of a woman that is also a critique of a superficial "masculine" society. But unlike Emma Bovary, the heroine doesn't flee to romantic infidelity but to schizophrenic inner depths.

The political implications are not hard to unravel: Amos Oz is suggesting that in her heart Israel is going mad dreaming of Arabs, while on the surface emotionally stunted "new Israelis" are going about their nation's business cut off from self and history. It's hardly surprising that the book caused controversy and was a best seller in Israel.

For American readers, though, "My Michael" is distinguished by its warmth, its lyricism and remarkable technical control, its fluent pattern of repetitions--threads of words and associations that weave and interweave a vast underwater net. In this Mr. Oz resembles such young American writers as William H. Gass and Joseph McElroy. Intelligent, heartfelt, perhaps a bit too small and self-enclosed, "My Michael" is undoubtedly one of the most accomplished foreign novels to appear here in the last few years; it is a most impressive American debut for Amos Oz.