It’s a twisted path they follow

Writers can spend five years writing a book, but editors at times complain that they won’t give even five hours to choosing a title. While some authors do seem to struggle endlessly for the right distillation (F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wanted “Trimalchio in West Egg” for “The Great Gatsby”), only a few come up with a sensational solution each time out, as though equipped with a title-hunting dowsing rod.

David Grossman, whose previous, critically embraced novels include “The Book of Intimate Grammar” and “Be My Knife,” again shows his gift for naming in his latest work. “Someone to Run With” is simple yet mysterious: It captures a secret human longing perhaps common to us all. It arouses curiosity: Who is running with whom, and from or to where?

Finally, it belongs -- the title’s literal and figurative meanings wind through the story like the leash on the dog that sets the action in motion, like the ribbon in the greasy braid of the story’s master criminal, like echoes of the Minotaur myth, in which Ariadne draws a thread through an underground maze, leading her hero to the monster at its center.

At first glance, “Someone to Run With” has the earmarks of a work of contemporary realist fiction. The setting is present-day Jerusalem, where political tensions and disputes are as common as pizza crusts and watermelon rinds. Modern entertainments such as soccer, pop music and heroin figure significantly.

The protagonists are Assaf, a 17-year-old boy working over summer vacation in a drowsy municipal office, and 16-year-old Tamar, a gifted singer bent on trading her life of comfort and privilege for that of a street entertainer. If Tamar has any flaw at all, it is that of too scrupulous self-criticism; she is wide-eyed, lovely and delicate even after shaving off her thick, curly black hair and trading her Levi’s for baggy overalls.

The colorful supporting cast comprises a scar-faced, reformed heroin addict with a heart of gold, an old Greek Orthodox nun bound by a vow to her monastic room since age 12 (also with a heart of gold), Assaf’s protective wanna-be brother-in-law (yes, golden) and Tamar’s devoted dog, Dinka, a prodigiously intelligent golden lab (ditto). Leading the minus side of the moral ledger is the aforementioned master criminal -- “The giant wore a black net tank top ... ‘You’re not bad ... ‘ said Pesach Bet Ha Levi. He took the toothpick out of his teeth and sucked it, and screened her with a mixture of suspicion and amused respect.” He’s followed by his gang of henchmen, a dumb brutal cop, and assorted other bullies and cold fish, including Tamar’s self-absorbed parents.

Good versus bad. Grossman eschews in large part the chiaroscuro of realism, the complex light-and-dark interplay of character development that can open the way to irony and deadpan humor. He is much more interested in the drama of archetypes and opposites, in stark contrasts and the twin saving graces of hope and fate. Assaf has the naivete of a true innocent whose manhood is about to be tested for the first time. Tamar charms all who meet her; she’s a paragon of resourcefulness, loyalty and courage. In other words, “Someone to Run With” is written in the heroic mode.

Grossman’s language, as rendered with sensitivity from the Hebrew by Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz, contains much that is beautiful and arresting. After Dinka jumps into a little pool, she swims “in the intense, frightened manner of swimming dogs, with that troubled and concentrated look they have, as if swimming were very hard work for them.” Or this description of another lifelong incarcerated nun: “She gradually eroded away into one narrow line, the scar of a white gaze.” There also are places where he risks the lyrical emotive tone devolving toward the trite or bathetic, as in “Theodora practically shook, as if he had carelessly touched her in her soul’s depth.”

Still, for all its draperies of modern-day life, this novel has the sweep and simplicity of a fable. Along with the Minotaur myth, there are echoes of Oliver Twist (the sections with Fagin’s merry band) and even Peter Pan. Like many of the best fables and myths, the long-distance run of Assaf, Tamar and Dinka is the story of a quest -- in fact, of multiple quests, one nesting inside the other. And, like the best fables, “Someone to Run With” hoists the reader into a world larger and more luminous than any found outside the book. Grossman has created a place of great dangers and improbable strokes of fortune, of compelling suspense and love’s labors gained.