Depending on where your funny bone resides, the opening of Michael Tregebov's first novel might present as either an exhilarating riff on Jewish family bickering or a gauntlet of meshugas. What sets it apart is the ricochet from leatherette recliner to the front lines of the West Bank.
Teddy, on satellite phone to his Winnipeg parents from inside ravaged Ramallah, has called to announce that he just signed on to be a human shield after witnessing, among other distressing scenes, an American protester bulldozed to death by an Israeli soldier: "They scooped her up, dropped her and smashed her." As we're processing this reference to a real news report from a few years ago, Teddy's wisecracking father resumes his deadpan patter: "You say insurgents, I say detergents."
If your impulse is to avoid this sort of spin on atrocity, push past the feeling. The barbed one-liners give way to addictive storytelling. Sammy and Anna, the parents, head for card night at the synagogue, where they encounter a creaky old friend: "Nathan Uzransky, a.k.a. Oz, with his small head, the wreckage of his bottom teeth, a little dab of Brylcreem on his hair, lost gaze and big Windsor knot." You can smell the hair oil and the fusty breath, and you accept it as gladly as Anna and Sam. At the card tables, you willingly judge the Goldmans, "who sold rubbing alcohol to the Indians," and their coterie of over-bejewelled "poor losers and sadistic winners."
A speaker has been scheduled after the card games, an "Arabist and terrorist expert" who will opine on the ethics of torture. Opening with a teaser terror scenario designed to force liberals to cave in to brutal methods, she's faced with Natch Perle: "buck-toothed communist doing entry work in the NDP, still at his age, who still wore a scarlet orthodontic retainer, at his age." Natch asks the expert if it might be ethical in certain circumstances to torture a child: "How about putting electrodes on a five-year-old?" The speaker can't speak, so Natch fills in, "Hey, I'm talking to you, sister. Where would you attach them? Take your time."
Others in the room attempt to freeze Natch out, but he's burning on the page. Told "don't be ludicrous" by the speaker, he asks if she has a monopoly on the ludicrous, then cranks up the assault until his dental hardware ejects from his mouth. He's appalling and mesmerizing, hyper-real in his sardonic rage. The real person would be dismissed as an embarrassing crank. Not Natch. And not his author. The scene sizzles with thematic verve.
Sammy suspects that the card gang has already got wind of Teddy's shameful West Bank gambit, and indeed, next time at cards the speaker is a fellow member, his subject, Human Shields [and]Dupes. Sammy is aghast, but considers the long view: "that life was like a barbecue, and that after the first half, you were just turned over on the grill."
The set-up for this line is perfect. It wedged me between a guffaw and sob, and I knew I wanted more. That's pretty much where Tregebov keeps you throughout the book. When we shift to occupied Ramallah and Teddy confronts Ariel Sharon's enforcers, meanwhile falling hard for a young Palestinian, the shocks and passion edge out the humour, but not the arresting ironies.
The cast of players, from stars to walk-ons, are distinct and immediate: their voices, clothes, skin, tics and quirks, their smudged glasses, the way you like or loathe them. The characters are in the room with you; or you're in the ditch with them, a diversion for Uzi-toting thugs.
Tregebov's dialogues attain what I can only call absurdist realism; they churn with the illogic of real hopes and hurts, blundering egos and dangerous ideals. Amid the scenes of compulsive talking, he shifts between points of view with nary a bump. I have one quibble: The long riffs of family dialogue begin to feel like simple displays of authorial prowess, blunting his serious themes with emotional slapstick. Happily, the third act restores the narrative drive, bound up with the gathering force of Tregebov's themes.
The novel will be a challenge to prize juries. It's a trend-breaker, aggressively funny and stealthily horrific, all mixed up together, plus it doesn't fret about including serious discussions on the politics of war - sort of like Hemingway, but with stand-up panache in place of biblical cadences.
Tregebov's Jewish Winnipeg raises echoes of Richler's Montreal. I think an equal literary mind might be at work here. Will Tregebov prove an equal talent? Is the book world still able to nurture such talents to maturity? Richler started younger, but I think there's a chance.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.