Forgetting

Nicholas Spice

• A Late Divorce by A.B. Yehoshua, translated by Hillel Halkin
  Harvill Press, 352 pp, £8.95, October 1984, ISBN 0 00 271448 5
• Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips
  Faber, 331 pp, £8.95, October 1984, ISBN 0 571 13398 3

Anyone who has had experience of the sad and subtle ways in which human beings torment one another under licence of family ties will appreciate the merits of A.B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce. The public for the book should therefore be large. Yehoshua is an Israeli writer writing about Israelis (the action of A Late Divorce takes place in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem one spring in the late Seventies), so only those readers with an intimate feeling for life in modern Israel will be able to measure fully the accuracy and depth of the book’s portraiture. But the reach of Yehoshua’s satiric talent extends far beyond his immediate subject-matter. If his characters are typically Israeli, they are also typically human. Whether they verge at times on being stereotypically so is open to argument. That, after all, is the great danger in writing satire, and I am not clear that Yehoshua has entirely avoided it.