A Hemingway Named Kaufman

By BEZALEL STERN

MATCHES
By Alan Kaufman
272 pages. Back Bay Books. $13.95.

Soon after first sitting down with Alan Kaufman for breakfast one morning not so long ago, I began to notice similarities between the author and Nathan Falk, the protagonist of his new novel, Matches. Nathan, like Kaufman, is tall, lanky, and gives off an aura of slight insecurity. There is something about both Nathan and Kaufman that is endearing but at the same time tough. Both author and subject speak and think in stark terms. For them, the world is full of right and wrong: the only problem is distinguishing the two.

Matches concerns the plight of an American who, after making Aliyah, joined the Israeli army at the advanced age of 28. (Most new recruits join at around 18, after they finish high school.) Nathan is a Jewish grizzly: large and obtrusive, knowledgeable yet world-weary. He is a soldier struggling for mercy in a war he didn’t want to fight. Of course, he wanted to be a soldier. He just didn’t realize war was going to be hard.

Already, the plot begins to sound suspiciously similar to For Whom the Bell Tolls or A Farewell to Arms, in which world-weary Americans getting involved in foreign wars for causes which, once clear, begin to take on shades of opacity as the battles progress, friends die, and enemies are killed.

And this is fine. Hemingway was a great writer, arguably one of the greatest American writers who ever lived. And, as most great writers have, he has had many copycats over the years. Hemingway’s style has been emulated so much, precisely because he made great writing look so easy. His blunt sentences, often focusing on simple ideas and concepts, in short-rapid fire, as from a sub-machine gun, read quickly and starkly, and seem deceptively simple to write.

Unfortunately, though, as many would-be novelists have found, writing like Hemingway is in fact incredibly hard. In contrast, parodying Hemingway is actually incredibly easy. This is precisely because most writing that tries to emulate the great author ends up sounding more like parody. Which brings us back to Nathan, and to his creator.

Kaufman, in striving to create his own Hemingwayesque masterpiece, falls into the unfortunate stylistic pitfall of a Hemingway imitator. In doing so, Kaufman comes up with passages like this one:

I had gotten very good down there in Gaza at making my anger immediately felt. We drank and fucked and talked all night of other things than ourselves, and it was as it had been before, as I had dreamed about things being when I was down there in Gaza, waiting to come here, and she didn’t ask me again to tell her about what I couldn’t articulate, which was, for me, a great relief. I couldn’t imagine ever uttering the word “love” to anyone. I was very glad to go to bed with her but didn’t want all that other stuff, not the verbal part of it, anyway, and really, not any of it. It was just a lot of shit, I felt, all the talk, of forever, of “Us,” and I wanted things to remain nice and clear and simple.

Instead of giving us the resonance of a creation of Hemingway, afraid of emotional attachment, strong, and tired, Nathan sounds more like a wimpy American, whimpering with the terror of his own surroundings. Ultimately, Nathan just becomes a parody of what Kaufman wishes him to be. In striving to give the novel a voice that its author doesn’t really understand, and so can’t truly articulate, Kaufman destroys what could have been an excellent novel. This is a pity, as he certainly has some interesting ideas to share.

Over breakfast, Kaufman told me about the time he spent in the Israeli army—the novel is semi-autobiographical (as was Hemingway’s greatest war fiction)—how life had changed for him since he came back to the United States. “People think of Israeli soldiers as fanatics, zealots,” he said. “What people don’t understand, is that Israeli soldiers are human beings. We saw families watching while their houses are torn down. How do we ethically justify this? I still don’t think we’ve addressed successfully the social and ethical implications of the situation.”

Kaufman himself was a member of one of the first Israeli units given the dubious privilege of dealing with aftershocks of and responses to the first intifada in Gaza. “Writing this book,” he said, “brought me back to the situation—lent it a vividness and immediacy. I walked around with this story in my gut for 18 years.” And in some ways, the renewed vividness was unwelcome. “I was giving a reading and was reading a passage of my book a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “All of a sudden my voice breaks and there are tears streaming down my cheeks.”

Nathan Falk, like Kaufman, must grapple with the twin beasts of power and helplessness that must torture all Israeli soldiers serving in the Palestinian territories. In one poignant scene in the book (one of the few scenes—all good—in which Kaufman stops following  Hemingway and lights out for the territory) Nathan is on night duty, in Gaza, on the Egyptian border. A small group of Egyptian soldiers sit directly on the other side of the fence. A cold peace between the two countries prevents violence, but the tension is palpable. Then, in a surprising twist, one of Nathan’s buddies pulls out a boom box and puts on a tape of the Beatles. “Suddenly, ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ boomed through the night and the excited Egyptians broke into a kind of psycho disco war-path step around the flames, the Kalatchnikovs slung from their shoulders swinging back and forth.”

The opposing soldiers, Egyptian and Israeli, dance for hours, and the writing, for once brilliant, along with the narrative, attains a wild orgiastic energy. Then, suddenly and without warning, the Egyptians begin to shoot their Kalatchnikovs at the Israelis. The scene is poignant both as metaphor and narrative. It is clear from this and a few (far too few) other passages in the novel that Kaufman has his own voice, one that deserves to be heard. It does both him and his audience a disservice to ape another’s.