As a form, the novel can never decide quite how stylish it should be. Is it a mirror or a music, a camera or a painting? Is it best designed for the long haul or for fine circular flights? Is it where we make a fetish of the perfect sentence, or a more relaxed religion of the appropriate form? Nabokov liked to dismiss writers who failed the Nabokovian sentence test, such as Camus, Mann, and Stendhal (who indeed likened the novel to a mirror). But the novelist ideally writes in paragraphs and chapters, not in sentences, as Woolf reminded her readers. Novelistic form, the accretion of many sentences, must find its own deeper, slower rhythm. In this regard, Iris Murdoch once divided the twentieth-century novel into the journalistic and the crystalline, and Woolf, the modernist aesthete who also loved Dickens and Scott and Tolstoy, couldn’t quite decide whether she liked her novels hospitably journalistic or stylishly crystalline. Like many of us, she wanted different pleasures from different novelists.
Joshua Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today. (And he is only thirty-six.) At his best, he resembles Saul Bellow: his sentences are all-season journeyers, able to do everything everywhere at once. He can be witty, slangy, lyrical, ironic, vivid; he possesses leaping powers of metaphor and analogy. Most writers develop certain talents at the expense of others, but Cohen relishes verbs as much as adjectives, metaphor-making as much as epigram-minting. Style is a patent priority: his fiction displays the stretch marks of its originality. In his new novel, “Moving Kings” (Random House), there are wonderfully strange verbs. In a cab: “The driver rancored away in Arabic, to himself or just a specter.” At a party: “A girl brisked over.” There are interesting new adjectives (or nouns turned into adjectives): “A hypermarket, a pharmacy, a dun huttish structure topped with a blinking red neon star.” And precise metaphorical descriptions, like this one of traffic in Queens: “He turned onto Northern Boulevard heading south. The cars seeped like spread tar and hardened into traffic.” Or the heat in Mexico: “The sun was sowing him a migraine.” But even when Cohen is not putting out his flags the prose is alert, tense with vitality. Here David King, newly arrived in Israel, prepares to meet his cousins: “The next morning, the second day—the day that God divided the sky from the waters below and so created the conditions for jetlag—David’s cousins were waiting in the lobby.”
Cohen is, in fact, a crystalline novelist with a journalistic openness to the world; his stylish sentences are loaded with the refuse of the real, with the facts, social data, and informational surplus of postmodernity. In this will to supreme combination, he resembles Thomas Pynchon (with Joyce the blessed progenitor), or David Foster Wallace. Cohen’s previous novel, the massive and massively ambitious “Book of Numbers” (2015), marched, in seven-league boots, over vast terrain: comparative theology, postmodern philosophy, questions of contemporary gender, the monstrous complacencies of the Internet age. As in Wallace’s work, there is a recognizable tension between the priority of style and the boisterous claims of the world, a tension as old as realism itself.
There are moments in Cohen’s work when his worldly omnivorousness (the desire to cover everything) and his stylistic talents (the desire to cover everything in the most brilliant style) seem to be running a race with each other. “Book of Numbers” was sometimes hard to read, not because it was incomprehensible or too demanding but because its textures were overwhelming, and because it struggled to find a form that could contain and focus those textures. Cohen’s natural inclination is toward a loquacious, storytelling largesse, but each of his sentences is also a micro-adventure in abundance. Here, in his new novel, he sketches some of the guys who work for David King’s company, King’s Moving. Each brief portrait is a stuffed pantechnicon:
“Moving Kings” also struggles with form, but this may represent a conscious effort on the author’s part at self-contraception. It is relatively brief (two hundred and forty pages), accessible, and more or less conventionally structured; it is highly intelligent but not a novel of ideas, and though its prose does plenty of swaggering, the swagger belongs to the characters—which is to say, most of the novel is written in close third-person or free indirect style, the grammar of everyday contemporary realism. It’s the right style for this novel’s world, which is burly with particularities and vibrant with voice. The atmosphere at times resembles a Jewish “Sopranos,” minus the violence—men, family, moneymaking, muscle. David King, the son of a Jewish immigrant and Holocaust survivor, reared in Queens, owns a successful moving company with storage facilities in all five boroughs. We first encounter him at a fancy fund-raiser in the Hamptons, where he stands out like a sweating cart horse among dry Arabians—bigger, coarser, burdened by work and apprehensions of work: “He moved among the servers who made $8.75 an hour and so who made about 14 cents, 14.5833 cents, he did the figures in his head, for each minute it took them to carve him primerib or fix him a scotch or direct him and his menthols to a smoking area.”
David King is recognizable enough, if not to the partygoers on Long Island: much less successful at life than at business; cocky, self-reliant, thinly cultured, wounded, comically poor in diet and karma. He has survived a heart attack, a pulverizing divorce from Bonnie, his Christian-convert wife—“Bonnie, the Fordham Road Albanian Orthodox who’d dipped in the mikveh and stepped out dripping for him”— and an affair with Ruth, his office manager. He has witnessed and waited out his daughter Tammy’s drug addiction and recovery, her graduation from N.Y.U. rewarded by the paternal gift of a brownstone in Crown Heights.
Until now, David’s Jewishness has been atavistically reflexive. He has visited Israel from time to time, but hasn’t given the country much concentrated thought, tending to liken its fate to his business prospects: if the core concern is strong, you don’t sweat the smaller stuff, which you can’t do much to influence anyway. That changes in the spring of 2015, after David’s heart attack. His cousin Dina e-mails to ask if he might host (and employ) her son, Yoav, who is finishing his national service in the Israeli Army. David responds from his convalescence in a way that seems forgivably sentimental, if also novelistically convenient. To have Israeli family in America, thinks David, is to have Israel in America: “If he’d stay in touch with Israel, if he’d maintain with Israel, certain responsibilities would devolve on the living after his demise. He was almost sure of it, he almost said it aloud: who among the living was going to shovel the dirt in his grave or say a kaddish? His daughter?”
A certain kind of Jewish novel would proceed to burn this familiar fuel: a father finds a substitute son, a religiously indolent American Jew renovates his ancient inheritance, the tough guy from Queens, getting older and sicker, softens up a bit. Cohen prepares the fire but proves nicely uninterested in the combustion. Wary of conventional payoffs, or even of conventional rises and falls, he likes to swerve away from a story or a character he has spent many pages establishing, in search of a fresh center of interest. The intermittency can be frustrating. As a novelist, he’s jittery, mobile, always on the prowl for new material, not so much easily distracted as easily consumed, quickly recentered. Once he has set up Yoav’s arrival and David’s soft patriarchal anticipation, he largely moves his focus away from David’s American scene and fills in, at some length, Yoav’s experiences as an Israeli soldier during the 2014 Gaza War.
The maleness of the world remains, but the novel’s energy inevitably changes: instead of Queens and American Jewishness, we get an inspired and troubling account of Yoav’s Army unit. We are introduced to the young men who fought alongside Yoav, in particular his friend Uri Dugri, who saved his life. (Uri eventually joins Yoav in New York, and the two work for King’s Moving.) Cohen writes dispassionately, from within the collective voice of the soldiers, about hardships received and imposed. A tone of defensive cynicism, of macho boredom, brings alive the costs, on both sides of the conflict, of the routinized violence:
Yoav and his squad mates are brash, entitled, sardonic. They are also afraid, and tentative about the validity of the very rights they enforce. Assigned to a border checkpoint, Yoav has the uneasy feeling that he has himself become the border, “dug into the sand along roads rived by rebar and garbled with barbedwire.” The soldiers strive to seem more permanent than they are, always mocked by the drifting sands of the desert, by its burned eternity: “If you convinced yourself, then you convinced the people crossing, and if you convinced the people crossing, then you convinced the wastes. That you were as rooted as the olive trees.”
Cohen convincingly inhabits the life of this Army unit, and in some respects the novel never quite recovers from the heat of his engagement. Some of that failure to recover is probably deliberate. One premise of “Moving Kings” is that when Yoav and Uri start working as movers for David King they bring with them not only a bit of Israel but a bit of the Israeli conflict. They can move (themselves; other people’s things), but they can’t move on. Enacting this post-traumatic return, Cohen’s novel surely needs to find itself repeatedly pulled back to powerful remembered descriptions of the men’s experiences in Israel.
A second premise of the book seems frailer. Cohen wants to suggest parallels between what Yoav and his crew did as soldiers in Israel and Palestine and what Yoav and his crew do as movers for David King. The combat has shifted from the desert to the streets. In New York, Yoav and Uri are nicknamed the Raelis by their co-workers, as if they were an élite squad within the squad. Cohen articulates a connection that probably did not need to be announced, and which barely survives serious scrutiny: “A group of guys go out hard, swarming the houses of strangers, taking the furniture apart, taking the furniture away, breaking shit by accident, and not by accident . . . who would’ve guessed that the army had been training him for moving?”
Perhaps because moving office furniture is clearly not much like smashing up a Palestinian house, Cohen ups the ante. Yoav and his crew get switched from ordinary moving duties to the much grimmer business of eviction. A new section opens with a found epigraph—“LET MY PEOPLE STAY”—and offers the information that this is taken from a sign “on a house facing foreclosure, Wakefield, Bronx, NY, Christmas 2012.” You understand why the author, in a novel already brimming with Biblical echoes (King David and the like), might seize on this proffered unsubtlety. But it holds out confusion, not clarity. Evicted Americans are like the ancient Israelites? Or maybe like modern Palestinians? And the mortgage brokers are like Pharaoh? Historically, politically, the differences between the obligations of the Israel Defense Forces and those of an American moving company (however unpleasant the contract) seem more acute than the similarities. “Back under the Occupation, there had been shooting and here in America there was no shooting, or none aimed at them,” Cohen writes. Under the occupation, he continues, channelling Yoav’s voice, they were able to smash things up, or call in a convoy of planes:
The labor might be similar, but the job certainly isn’t. The reader feels this frailty inscribed into the very form of the novel. The urgency of the descriptions of Israeli combat repeatedly calls out to the weaker urgency of the descriptions of American “combat”—overshadowing them with their higher stakes, and repeatedly summoning the novelist back to Israel and away from more mundane New York.
Again, as if divining such objections, Cohen increases the bid. A long section, about two-thirds into the novel, opens the story of Avery Luter, an African-American and a Vietnam vet who has fallen on hard times. Sacked from his job as a Port Authority toll collector, he stopped paying his bills, and is essentially camping out in the big house he inherited from his mother. He is served with an eviction notice; in a harrowing scene, Yoav and the crew are sent to move his belongings. Avery’s suffering, and above all his race, would seem finally to enable and validate the connections that the novel is keen to make: “Let My People Stay” can be freshly re-inserted into the rich and terrible history of African-American enslavement, to echo the political and liturgical work that its inversion, “Let My People Go,” has long performed in black music and literature. And how novelistically useful that Avery has also become a Muslim, and has a second name and alter ego, Imamu Nabi! The title page of this section runs, “Avery Luter, Imamu Nabi (Another Occupation).”
I’m still unpersuaded by Cohen’s thematic ambitions, by this stabbing at similitudes. (Whose occupation, by whom? Is Avery Luter somehow closer in anguish and dispossession to the Palestinians, because, like them, he is Muslim?) But an odd thing happens, in this consistently surprising novel. The tale of Avery Luter’s life pulls the book toward yet another narrative center. By this moment in the book, David King has faded in interest and presence, and now Yoav and Uri also fall away from our attention, as we enter the desperately straitened world of Avery Luter. Cohen inhabits Luter’s existence as vitally as he inhabited the Israeli Army unit: it’s a beautiful portrait, utterly engrossing, full of passionate sympathy.
“Moving Kings” is a strange, superbly unsuccessful novel. There’s not a page without some vital charge—a flash of metaphor, an idiomatic originality, a bastard neologism born of nothing. You could say that it is patchworked with successes: David King in the Hamptons, Yoav and Uri in the Israeli Army, the King’s Moving crew at work in New York, Avery Luter flailing in his mother’s house. Yet these stories are more convincing than the connections, thematic and formal, offered to bind them. Cohen never finds that deep novelistic form, that tensile coherence, which Woolf idealized. This is a book of brilliant sentences, brilliant paragraphs, brilliant chapters. Here things flare singly, a succession of lighted matches, and do not cast a more general illumination. But Cohen opened his previous novel with a challenge: “There’s nothing worse than description: hotel room prose. No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is.” So if his most accessible novel yet, rich in all three despised elements, frustrates conventional satisfactions, is it because he has failed to find the right form or because he is trying to found a new one? ♦
