Missing connections, family anomie, and breakup inadmissible to Jewish piety and Israeli solidarity (but of course not exclusive of endless family discussions) are the favorite themes of the delicate and ironic young Israeli novelist Avraham Yehoshua. In two books of stories, Three Days and a Child and Early in the Summer of 1970, Yehoshua brought to his stories of alienation and antagonism within the Israeli family such fine political shading that I am not surprised to find in the comic situation of The Lover, his first novel, a parallel comedy of Arab-Jewish distrust that does not shirk the ferocity that grows every month. Through the eyes both of a fifteen-year-old Arab working in the husband's garage and of the lover's ninety-year-old grandmother … we see an Arab and an Israeli locked into a debate of proximity, alikeness, mental hatred, a debate that Yehoshua's superb ability to render both presences relieves...