As a boy Amos Oz did what any writer does. Whenever his parents took him to
one of the fashionable Jerusalem cafés where they went to gossip “about
power struggles among professors and the intrigues of editors and
publishers”, the child would sit silently watching the glamorous patrons as
they talked and drank under the chandeliers in the cigarette smoke. From a
“few uncertain outward signs”, clothes and mannerisms and snatches of
conversation, he used to weave “complicated but exciting life stories” into
a “dizzyingly rich . . . kaleidoscope of plots”. Yet despite his pleasure in
this “secret little game” (“How many possibilities there are!”), the young
Oz suspected that a writer was someone who was “rather phoney, even somewhat
ridiculous”.
This conflict, which was set out in his previous book, the memoir A Tale of
Love and Darkness (2003), underpins Oz’s new novel. Rhyming Life and Death
is a peculiar meditation on the art of storytelling, which celebrates the
creativity of its protagonist – a lustful middle-aged writer known only as
“the Author” – even as it invites us to regard him as a bit of a fool. The
balance is always uncertain. The novel contains many descriptions of women’s
legs, bottoms and breasts; tonally, it is closer to Oz’s raffish critical
prose (“the good reader”, he says, reads like “a man . . . engrossed in an
issue of Playboy”) than to his melancholy reflections on Zionism in A Tale
of Love and Darkness. The Author has come to Tel Aviv for a “literary
evening”. He sits in a greasy café, waiting to appear before the members of
“the Good Book Club”, where he expects to answer questions such as “Do you
write with a pen or with a computer?” and “How much, roughly, do you earn
from each book?”. Distraction is welcome. His waitress is wearing a short
skirt and he can follow the outline of her underwear: a “slight asymmetry in
favour of the left buttock . . . like a wink promising an Aladdin’s cave of
secret thrills”. Striking a dust-jacket pose (“he is quite a well-known
personality”), the Author dangles a cigarette from the fingers of one hand
in an “intensely cultured look”. The waitress ignores him.
Never mind: he will invent her. At sixteen, the Author imagines, “Ricky” works
in a beauty salon. A reserve-team goalkeeper called Charlie is her first
love, “the first man who taught her to slow-dance, and to wear a micro
bikini, and to lie naked face down in the sun and think dirty thoughts”.
Charlie drops Ricky after a week to go back to his ex-girlfriend Lucy, the
runner-up in a beauty contest who has skinny legs and “a slight, not
unattractive squint in her left eye”. Eight years pass: the micro bikini
lies forgotten under a sewing kit at the back of a drawer and Charlie is
married with three children, making good money by exporting solar water
heaters. Yet Ricky has never forgotten Lucy. The idea that they once slept
with the same man excites her. “We did . . . exactly the same positions for
him”, she fantasizes, “in the same room, in the same king-size bed”. Did
Ricky sleep with Charlie because, really, she wanted to sleep with Lucy? And
would Lucy like to meet her again, at a hotel perhaps?
The reverie establishes a pattern. Playing his secret game, the Author
concocts vigorously detailed lives for nearly everyone he sees. Most of his
raw material comes from the Good Book Club. As a critic presents his latest
novel to the audience, the Author tunes out and scans the rows of rapt
readers. Hiding his roving eye behind “an expression that combines
loneliness, cultural sensitivity and sadness”, he hopes to see “a pair of
legs just as they uncross”, or perhaps “a rivulet of perspiration running
down deep into the crack between a pair of breasts”. He settles for a
“broad-faced, heavily built woman” with “vein-lined legs” who “long ago
abandoned any attempt at dieting”. Behind her a teenage boy with pimples and
messy hair fidgets. The two became friends, the Author decides, when
“Miriam” discovered that shy “Yuval” was a poet. One day Miriam’s literary
enthusiasm stirs the boy to touch her breast. She forgives his recklessness,
but a nosy neighbour tells her lurid tales about him and Yuval never visits
Miriam again (except in his verse and in “murky nocturnal fantasies”). He
will kill himself unless – this very night – the Author recognizes a fellow
martyr to Art and “opens the doors of the world of literature” to him.
A certain restlessness accompanies the reader’s pleasure in these brisk,
unconnected sketches, of which there are more than a dozen: one wonders if
Oz plans to test, or merely exhibit, his Author’s imagination. The desire
for some kind of corrective is met when an audience member has the cheek to
snigger at the Author. His punishment is merciless. The Author casts him as
a jobless sixty-year-old who “suffers terribly from piles” and shares a damp
mattress with his paralysed mother; in the middle of the night, the Author
cackles, this smart aleck will be “pulling the smelly chamber pot out from
underneath his mother’s body, then panting with the effort as he turns her
on her front to wipe her clean and fit her with a dry pad”. The sniggerer
has the last laugh, however, playing a decisive part in the novel’s longest
scene. At the Good Book Club the Author meets Rochele, who is to read
extracts from his work to the audience. She is a nervous woman in her
thirties who has a cat and collects matchboxes; when the Author shakes her
hand, her neck blushes. Once the question-and-answer session is over, he
offers to walk her home. Rochele lives nearby and she can point out her
window in a block of flats. The Author observes that there is no light on:
is she single?
Rochele appears to be the only character here whose life the Author does not
invent. Her internal monologue announces a promising rival presence that
might resist his domineering daydreams, but she is too abject: she worries
that the Author will use her bathroom and regrets hanging a bra on a chair
(“what if . . . you can see at once that it’s padded?”). Whether or not
Rochele’s fears are realized depends on how you read the pivotal but
equivocal moment in which the Author hesitates on her doorstep. Either he
walks away into the hot night, or he gives Rochele the time of her life; Oz
reserves his most florid writing for the second scenario. The Author’s
“experienced” fingertips, a shamelessly extended simile tells us, “steer her
enjoyment like a ship towards its home port . . . anticipating and
cautiously avoiding every sandbank, steering clear of each underwater reef”.
Readers who have trouble with this may find it difficult to keep a straight
face when Rochele pleasures him, “like an assiduous schoolgirl”. Oz probably
wants us to laugh, because just when we are distracted by the sense that
Rochele exists for no other reason than to illustrate how the Author likes
to spend his cultural capital, a sudden memory of the mysterious sniggering
unstiffens our hero. Not even the thought of Ricky’s panties can help.
Around this bathos the narrative unspools:
If only he could say . . . please don’t be sad, after all, the characters in
this book are all just the Author himself . . . whatever happens to them
here is really only happening to him . . . you, Rochele, are just a thought
in my mind and whatever is happening to you and me is actually only
happening to me.
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Oz glossed Rhyming Life
and Death as a challenge to the reader who would rather be “handed a
prepared dish” than be “invited into the kitchen”. This makes the novel
sound more radical than it is: in truth, the solemn metafictional musing
rarely feels like anything more than ballast for the breezy draughtsmanship
of the character sketches. While there is much to enjoy here – not least,
the typically cool and measured translation by Nicholas de Lange, who has
brought Oz to anglophone readers for more than forty years – the novel may
in the end be too slight to survive its own scrutiny. The self-reflexive
passages undercut so much that one feels rebuked for having paid attention
to the protagonist’s make-believe, yet the narrative consists of little
else.
Although we are glad to see Oz eventually poke fun at the Author’s
presumption, there might have been a less destructive way to teach him the
old lesson that his subjects have lives beyond his ken. “What purpose . . .
is served by your stories?”, the Author asks, wilting and chastened. “Who .
. . needs your shabby fantasies about all kinds of worn-out sex scenes?”
Like many things in this short novel, it is meant to be a joke – but at
whose expense, perhaps only Amos Oz can tell.
Amos Oz
RHYMING LIFE AND DEATH
Translated by Nicholas de Lange
155pp. Chatto and Windus. £12.99
978 0 701 18228 1
Anthony Cummins's translation of Émile Zola's The Flood will be
published later this year.
