Joshua Cohen, _Moving Kings_

I AM A great admirer of Joshua Cohen's fiction, and have been for a while--I got in on the ground floor, so to speak, with Cadenzas for the Schneiderman Violin Concerto. I bought Moving Kings about the time it came out, but until two weeks ago it was just sitting undisturbed on the shelf. I've been wondering why it took me three years to read it. 

The cover, in part. This is the first Cohen book with a boring cover. I know books are not to be judged by their covers, but come on, Random House! You can do better than this! 

And in part because it seemed to be the closest Cohen had yet come to a conventional novel. Not fair of me, I know. But there is a moment when a favorite writer decides to tack towards the mainstream (cf. Ben Marcus, or Sonic Youth signing with Geffen, that sort of thing). You fully understand that it is the right thing for them to do, but that understanding has a melancholy edge.

Well, I shouldn't have worried. Moving Kings is less innovative, formally, than Cohen's previous work, but the sentences still reconcile strength and grace, the novelistic eye still lands again and again on the most revealing detail, and the ambition to plumb the depths of Jewish experience remains at the core of the enterprise. 

The first part of the novel is about David King, who is King David to a small empire, a moving business in New York City and environs. His father was a Holocaust survivor who came to the USA; his father's brother emigrated instead to Israel, where he started his own family. So right there we have an interesting contrast between different paths out of the Shoah taken by members of the same family. 

David's family life takes on familiar kinds of American (and King David-esque) complications, marriage, adultery, divorce, kids who are just a bit contemptuous. On the other side of the world, his uncle has a daughter, who has a son, which son is fresh out of the Israeli army (which has its own empire-building complications). The Israeli cousin calls David up--could he find Yoav a job? Send him over, says David.

Trailing Yoav comes Uri, from Yoav's old unit. Both are suffering from PTSD, but Yoav seems to be making the stronger effort to get clear of it--Uri verges on the sociopathic.

As it happens, David's moving business has recently picking up a new kind of work: evictions. Yoav and Uri find themselves assigned to a team doing exactly this--which rhymes, hauntingly, chillingly, with what they had been doing in Judea/West Bank/Occupied Territories. In Israel, the idea was simply to smash; in New York City, they are to salvage what they think can be sold: "Otherwise, the work they were doing wasn't too different."

That was a sentence I had to stop and stare at for a minute or two. Like plenty of folks, I think what the Israeli government is doing is wrong. But is what's going on when someone gets evicted a few blocks away any less wrong? Am I a hypocrite, a coward, to object to the one but not the other?

Are we headed to a big blazing climax? Yes.

So far, Cohen's tacking to the mainstream is working out just fine.