| Abstract
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A Song of Ilan is the anti-love story of two Americanized Israelis, one of whom, Ilan, once prevented a suicide bombing by shooting a Palestinian woman. Over the course of the novel, Ilan becomes a suicide bomber himself. The other protagonist, Yedit, orphaned by the Arab-Israeli conflict, is a secular exegetist who has published a translation of the Psalms that makes belief in God distasteful if not impossible. The novel mirrors the search for narrative and meaning in text with the search for purpose and direction in religion. Ilan's metamorphosis into a terrorist provides an answer both to his questions about God and to the outcome of a cohesive narrative. The novel is told in three parts. Each is a version of the same autumn day. In the first part, Ilan and Yedit are married and spend the day rock-climbing. In the second, Yedit leaves Ilan. In the third, they've never met, but reading Yedit's book has led Ilan to start wearing a suicide bomber's vest on his morning commute. On the day of the telling, he meets Yedit on the Four Train. The novel's language translates the present tense action—rock-climbing, gardening, riding a train—into a series of flashbacks and religious questions. For example, the rock becomes the Palestinian woman, a transformation Ilan can only grapple with by meditating on the endless allusions of each word in the Psalms. The three sections are not alternatives to each other, but a cumulative whole, read in order and understood comprehensively. The a-linear, inherently contradictory narrative pursues a question, "How will Ilan resolve his crisis with God?" that does develop linearly across the three simultaneous tellings. Ilan's solution, to sacrifice his life to kill a heretic, Yedit, also answers the question of narrative linearality. Within the aesthetics of a pre-postmodern narrative, the killer of a suicide bomber must ultimately become one himself.
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