Erasing the Line Between Fiction and Confession

By GEORGE ROBINSON

THE SAME SEA
By Amos Oz.
208 pages. Harcourt Brace. $24.

A French critic once asked the notoriously grumpy film director John Ford why the theme of family was so central to his work. Ford snarled, "You had a mother, didn't you?"

When told this anecdote, Amos Oz laughs heartily, then nods and says, "Exactly. That is it exactly."

Everyone has a family, often an unhappy one, and that fact fascinates Oz, providing the subject matter for nearly all of his novels. His latest, The Same Sea is no exception, a tale of a bizarrely extended family that consists of father, son, dead mother, son's girlfriend, girlfriend's other lover, and girlfriend's less-than-honest business associate. These people interact across time and space, from Tibet to Bat Yam, from beyond the grave to back into the womb, in an intricate tapestry of brief vignettes, often in verse, that is quite unlike anything else the Israeli novelist had done in a career that now spans nearly four decades.

"I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world," Oz says. "Most people are not monogamous by nature, and the socioeconomic pretexts for the traditional family have expired in many parts of the world. So why should people get married, raise kids, fight and make up, disappoint each other and hope for more, and expect to have grandchildren?"

Oz has four grandchildren of his own. At sixty-two, he is still trim and handsome, slight, almost elfin, with a puckish humor and a sly grin that suggests that he thoroughly enjoys the role of amused eyewitness, even if he is by his own admission somewhat baffled by what he sees and depicts.

"People invest more in the family than in anything else in their lives, even though for many of them it is a source of pain and shame," Oz says. "On this I'm still working. If I had the answers, I'd drop storytelling and move on to sociology or anthropology. Or maybe sexology."

From his early novels of kibbutz life like Elsewhere, Perhaps and A Perfect Peace to urban-based fictions like Black Box, Don't Call It Night and Panther in the Basement, Oz has explored intimate communities that are best characterized as extended families in crisis.

"All of my novels are democracies," he says. "There is no one protagonist, but a cast of many who are equally important."

That characterization applies equally well to the new book, but what sets it apart, besides Oz's difficult decision to finally write about his mother's suicide when he was twelve, is the series of brief poetic vignettes limning the intricate play between Albert, a sixty-something accountant, his son Enrico, who has gone to Tibet on a spiritual quest, Enrico's girlfriend Dita, a would-be filmmaker and Dubi, a sweaty, pudgy loser who has swindled her out of some money she has raised to make a film. There are dozens of other characters, all drawn quickly and deftly, but the real joker in the deck is a character called the Narrator who is none other than Oz himself.

Given the complexity of the book, its unusual form and the painful nature of some of the material, one is not surprised that it took the normally prolific Oz five years to write it. "This book took years and years to erase and chisel away," he says. "It had to be fatless, it had to condense an entire life span into a couple of pages. What conventional novels do through lengthy exposition, this one tries to do in a very tight and immediate way." He chooses an elaborate and peculiar metaphor, trying to explain the difficulty he had in creating The Same Sea.

"It was like first taking off and then building the aircraft!" He laughs at his odd choice of words, then continues, "I really wanted this to start rolling right from the first pace, and the flashforwards and flashbacks and the psychological and sociological and economical data had to be put together while the thing is soaring and that is hard to do. It takes a lot of erasing."

That effort was not without its costs. A self-described "serial monogamist," he was stuck inside the book, unable to work on another one at the same time. And the process itself was demanding.

"This was the most intense book I have every written, partly because this is a novel about a mystical merger and community that includes even myself," he says. "This was about erasing the line between fiction and confession, among many other lines that I deliberately crossed or even erased in this novel--the line between poetry and prose, storytelling and music. I wanted this book to sing and dance. It is meant to be a work of music as much as a work of literature. A lot of it is rhythmic, metered, even rhymed. (I'm not even sure if I call this verse, it's more of a hybrid.)"

Has Oz himself ever played an instrument or sung in public?

He finds the question very amusing.

"If I could play or compose I wouldn't be writing books," he says. "This book is a compensation for not being able to be a composer or play or even sing, or to dance without stepping on other people's feet. This is my substitute, my musical work." When he discusses the experience of reading the book aloud--"this book almost begs to be read aloud," he says enthusiastically--the musical metaphor is right there again.

"Here in New York I can't just read it in Hebrew, I have to read it in English," he protests with a chuckle. "It's like asking a pianist to give a public recital on the flute." Flute is the chamber music instrument par excellence echoing the condition to which Oz aspires in The Same Sea.

"It's a family saga condensed into chamber music," he says. "This is achieved through a principle of total transparency. No matter that some of them are very far away, even dead; they all keep each other on their radar screens, they always know what the others are doing in real time, they always talk to one another as if they are in the same room." Yet despite all that--or perhaps because of it--Oz sees the novel as "a story simple and gutsy: love and death, desire and loss, desolation and consolation, the great and simple things in life."

And, of course, family. Always family.