Review in Haaretz, September 12, 2007.

What is the Opposite of a "Victorian Novel"?

By Maya Arad

"Lev meshuga" (Crazy Heart) Dorit Abusch, Hasifria Hahadasha, 344 pp., NIS 88

"Crazy Heart" is a story about a crisis in the life of a woman in her thirties: either a late adolescent crisis, or an early midlife crisis. She leaves one partner and finds another, the opposite of the previous one, whom she will also leave in the end. She leaves the academic world and instead of an Egyptologist becomes a marketing agent for an asthma drug – and again leaves marketing in favor of a possible return to the academic life. She is abandoned suddenly by her twin sister, who dies in her sleep, and as a result develops a series of symptoms and phobias that keep her confined to her apartment.

Between one crisis and the next, Noa, the heroine, spends her time on family visits, vacations, and business trips all over Manhattan, Zurich, Venice and Tel Aviv, acquires new friends (a nun who was once an elephant trainer, an eccentric art scholar, an Italian millionaire) and reveals her life story up until now (a mother who died in her sleep like Noa’s twin sister, a father who was absent from his daughters' lives, the dependence she developed on her twin sister, who is much less "successful" but has much better life skills).

This book is an opportunity to get to know one of the most interesting authors writing today in Hebrew, in my opinion,. In it Abusch returns to all the subjects that preoccupied her in her previous books ("Hayored" – Fallen Man; "Kol sheni" – Second Voice; and two short story collections, "Hedim veruhot" – Sounds and Spirits; and "Tzel arokh rashum begir" – Long Shadow Drawn in Chalk): personal and professional crises, life outside Israel, the academic world with all its intrigues and disappointments, and primarily separation and abandonment (the death of the mother is a recurring motif in her work).

I myself was introduced to Abusch about 20 years ago, when I was 14. In an old issue of the literary quarterly Akhshav I found a novella called "Hedim veruhot," mysteriously signed “A. Dorit,” which described one summer in the life of a professor of linguistics who is undergoing a midlife crisis. At the age of 14, the mid-twenties and the early forties seem equally distant from you, and therefore I saw no reason to wonder how such a young writer had chosen to write about a midlife crisis of all things. Instead, I was fascinated by the rhythmic prose, the well-constructed sentences, the elegant structure of the paragraphs. I was so fascinated that I didn't heed the warning of the professor who hated the science of syntax, and almost two decades later I found myself, like the heroine of "Crazy Heart," abandoning an academic career in linguistics – even if it was not in order to sell medicine.

And perhaps it is no coincidence that I didn't see the warning signs. Abusch's works are written in first person, and one has to be an experienced reader, which I certainly was not at the age of 14, in order to see the author's ironic wink behind the first-person narrator. For example, it is easy to see the first-person narrator of "Crazy Heart," who almost joyfully describes herself as "lazy and spoiled," as an annoying, dependent woman who is always looking for someone to protect her from life. She takes for granted all the good things that are showered upon her and that fall at her feet, the family wealth that releases her from concerns about a livelihood, the post-doctoral stipends that she is offered without any effort on her part (I counted three), a new well-to-do and loving partner.

One has to read between the lines in order to see that the person telling us these things is not unlike Holden Caulfield, the hero of "Catcher in the Rye," who tries hard to convince us how cool he is, while experienced readers immediately understand that he is a lost and socially rejected adolescent. Noa presents herself to us as a mature and experienced woman who decides to change careers in midlife, but in fact she is an adolescent girl who has still not decided what to do when she grows up.

When she describes Ami, her new partner, who is madly in love with her, she reveals the sterile relationship with her previous partner, Idan. When she casually describes the mysteries of the European cities she visits, the sophisticated brand names she buys, the restaurants where she eats, what is revealed is a touching, confused woman, lacking basic life skills, a woman who is unsuccessfully trying to go through the motions of a career, an intimate relationship and other things that adults do ("It was a real treat to be driven to JFK by the company driver, accompanied by a strong and muscular young man […]. I really enjoyed boarding the Swissair plane, with an elegant leather pocketbook containing a cell phone and a Palm pilot"). In the meantime, other ironical surprises are awaiting Noa. When she herself tries to take under her wing people who seem to her even more unfortunate and weak than she (Clara the nun and Sandy the academician whose sanity is precarious), it turns out that as opposed to Noa herself, these two were quite capable of taking care of themselves.

The book is full of sights and reflections, opposites (Noa and her twin sister Nami, her previous partner and her new one) and dualities (Nami and the dead mother, Clara the nun and Nami), which are interwoven and reach a surprising change in direction at the end of the story. Noa tells her story in what seems to her a logical and explicatory manner, but she never mentions the most important questions. Why did she stay with Idan, who showed her so little love, for four years? Why did she leave him after he cheated on her once? Why was Ami, her new partner, attracted to her?

Noa also chooses to ignore the question of family and children – not a trivial matter for an Israeli woman in her thirties. Even someone who doesn't choose marriage and a family cannot ignore this question, but Noa ignores it entirely (except for mentioning the fact that the subject never came up between her and Idan). This disregard is especially blatant in light of the fact that Nami, her twin sister, married and became a mother at an early age.

Until Nami's death, Noa sees Nami's children as competition for the attention of her sister (who is like a substitute mother to her). After her sister's death she takes the children under her wing and becomes close to them, and it seems that for the first time she has found her mission in living her sister's life, in a manner that reminds her of "Victorian novels, in which a spinster aunt enters a home in which a young mother has died, and raises her children." But she is not given the opportunity: "I was not living in the 19th century, and the social conventions of my time determined that I had to live my own life rather than continuing the life of someone else."

This novel really is not "Victorian," and in fact it is hard for the reader to decide to which genre it belongs. During the entire book Abusch relies on a first-person narrative. A recurring scene in Abusch's work is of people who meet for the first time in uncomfortable circumstances, and in the embarrassment of the encounter introduce themselves inadequately. Instead of a conversation, they give their resume or blurt out inappropriate intimate details. Along with this feature, of characters who are presented directly, there is another feature in "Crazy Heart" – the events themselves are very extreme, the characters live exotic lives (great wealth, travel in the cities of Europe and America, circus adventures, a plot about death and sex). This combination of direct presentation and extreme and exotic events cause Abusch's latest book to constitute a strange and surprising genre. It is evident that this is sophisticated literature, but it includes elements that are reminiscent of deliberately lowbrow pulp literature.

Because of its specific features – a story of the education of a woman towards the end of her youth – "Crazy Heart" is on the genre seam between canonical literature and chick-lit. (In my opinion, that is how we should also understand the repeated references in this book to acrobatic sexual relations and to masculine organs: This is a presumably daring contra-objectification, which is characteristic nowadays of chick-lit). I mention chick-lit not necessarily in a negative sense. Chick-lit is one of the freshest genres today, perhaps because it is a kind of updated version of the classical bildungsroman.

The classical feminine bildungsroman (like "Jane Eyre" or "Middlemarch") told the story of a girl who grows up and finds herself a husband and a satisfying life (and this novel specifically "told" the story, i.e. it was written from an "external" point of view, in third person). Chick-lit changes the bildungsroman – telling it from "inside," in first person. Its starting point is an ironic inversion: a young woman who has reached the conclusion that "no romance is going to come of this" – her youth has passed and she will find neither a husband nor a satisfying life. In the end, to her surprise, she finds both.

That is not the case in "Crazy Heart." In the end Noa remains alone, without a partner and without her twin sister, and returns to her academic career, but not with the sense that this is the satisfying life that she wants. In terms both of form and of content, "Crazy Heart" seems to be designed to leave us wondering: In the final analysis, where is this book located among the various genres? Why does Noa behave as she does? And which is the crazy heart – the one that stopped beating, or that of Noa, which seems to flutter with adolescent abandon? If we are left wondering at the end of the book – like the heroine herself – that was apparently Dorit Abusch's intention.

Translated from Hebrew by Miriam Schlusselberg.

Maya Arad is a Hebrew writer who recently conquered the Israeli literary scene with her genre-breaking poetry novel "Another Place, a Foreign City" inspired by Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin," and with her novel "Seven Moral Failings". She is a writer in residence at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Stanford University.