Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s fourth book sits somewhere between a novel of ideas, a thriller and a character study – a big old-fashioned work of literary fiction in a world where the trend is for the inward-looking. It opens with a bang, as Lilach (known as Leela) Shuster, an Israeli-American living with her husband, Mikhael, in California’s Silicon Valley, tells us that her son Adam, 16, has been accused of killing a Black boy from his school. “That’s not true,” Leela tells us – but she isn’t really sure.
Leela and Mikhael seem to have everything – money, good jobs, a house that makes their family back in Israel gawp – but they are unsettled. They have Americanised their names to fit in and feel further away from home than ever. “We raised an American child who went to high school with American children, and now they say he killed another American child.”
They feel under siege: in the opening scenes, there’s an attack on a synagogue, where four people are injured and one killed by a man wielding a machete. “They said on the news he was Black,” offers Leela’s mother. “Since when do Blacks attack Jews? That’s always been the white people’s job.” Then, at a party, Black schoolboy Jamal Jones dies of a drug overdose. Leela’s son Adam, who has told others – but not his mother – that he was being bullied by Jamal, is accused of supplying the drugs. Graffiti appears on the school wall: THE JEW KILLED HIM. Thus is antisemitism enacted, by reframing the victim as the aggressor.
This is all busy enough, but Gundar-Goshen gives herself other plates to spin, notably with the character of Uri, a man who runs a self-defence group that Adam attends, where the motto is “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first”, where punching one another in the gut is a rite of passage, and where kids are made to kill rats with their bare hands.
Once the story is rooted, the pages turn easily, as Leela becomes more and more worried about Adam, and it’s one of the book’s strengths that we hear almost nothing from him directly – because the story is told by Leela, and teenagers are unknowable to their parents. Like any parent she learns that she, the face he knew before he knew his own, knows less about his life now than an acquaintance at school does. When a girl Adam knows describes him to Leela as “your fucked-up kid”, it hits her like a slap. Who is her son really?
The tension ratchets up as the police get involved, as Uri exerts a greater hold on Adam, as Jamal Jones’s mother demands justice. In some senses The Wolf Hunt is everything we could want it to be: it reaches out and wraps itself around the issues – parenting, antisemitism, masculinity – and exemplifies them in character and dialogue. The book is efficient, effective and doesn’t outstay its welcome, but its efficiency is also a limitation. It feels schematic when Leela becomes less a character and more a cross between detective and omniscient narrator, visiting Jamal Jones’s mother, talking to Adam’s schoolfriends, engaging with the police, to enable them all to join the story.
Secondary characters such as 90-year-old Dwayne, a Black resident of the retirement home where Leela teaches, exist to deliver pithy points: “Maybe a Black kid can beat up your son after school,” he tells Leela, “but when school is over for real, it’ll be your son who acts as if this country is his parents’ back yard.” And along the way we get a swell of narrative switches and surprises that feel unearned and largely irrelevant. They add to the sense that The Wolf Hunt’s interest in highly dramatised issues would make a great film – but only a good book.
The Wolf Hunt by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is published by Pushkin Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
