A vocal member of the disaffected Left in a country constantly straining under the pressures of political conflict, Mr. Yehoshua is acutely conscious of political issues in his work, but his deepest imaginative concerns lie elsewhere; and the delicate shifting tensions between political surface and what I would call elemental depths are a principal source of his fiction's piquancy, its elusive, haunting appeal.

The surface of "The Lover" would seem to justify describing it straightforwardly as a novel of the Yom Kippur War and its aftermath. The story, in a technique possibly suggested by Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," is told through the alternating monologues of six central characters: Adam, a prosperous middle-aged Haifa garage-owner; Asya, his wife; Gabriel, her young lover, who has returned from a decade abroad to be swept up in the October war; Dafi, the teen-age daughter of Adam and Asya; Na'im, a young...