Canter Bridge

It is difficult to categorize this seductive first novelistic offering by Naomi Ragen.

Somewhat sheephishly, this middle-aged, white, male reviewer confesses its tones of over-written girly pop, an aspect that explains its being laid aside half-read for six months before it jumped back into my suitcase and lured me into a hungry, late-night series of readings to finish it. This element of Jephte’s Daughter is most charitably explained as the work of an immature but promising novelist.

Then there is the tendency towards caricature, a trait placed in service of an almost Wellhausian disdain for ritual. This leveling of complex religious reality is used against both Jewish and Gentile denizens of Ragen’s pages: for example, the preternaturally hateful Hassidic first husband of Ragen’s heroine (Isaac ben Harshen) and the erstwhile Roman Catholic noviate who eventually gets the girl (the promisingly named David Hope). The key virtue of the latter protagonist is that he escapes all that churchly stuff that had him tied in knots.

Caricature also appears in the clumsy reconversion of David Hope from the Church’s bosom to the heretofore secret Jewish identity of his deceased mother, though this may merely be the quibble of a Gentile and Christian reader who must acknowledge that stories of conversion that run in the opposite direction are rarely handled any better.

She has cast her academics in almost universally unfeeling and villainous form and located them in all the right places, Cambridge chief among them. I suppose it provides a convenient place for that.

Finally, there is the unblinking romanticism of the book, whereby the appeal of strong feeling and its culmination in the girl getting the guy—and vice versa—are granted a self-authenticating absoluteness without the need for further discussion.

So, if Ragen has written these several books within the cover of just one, how is that this reviewer in the end finds himself strangely moved by the book and eager to move on now to the more mature Naomi Ragen?

‘Difficult to say. I think the young novelist touched a vein. She has taken the measure of religious bigotry in several of its guises and offered something that seems compelling and real in its place, even if one wonders how the dazzling Batsheva and her David got along after the rains returned to Jerusalem and the drains clogged from time to time.

She has in the end told a good story, not with the character development of an accomplished novelist, but with enough justice that a chain of improbable sequences actually comes together as remotely plausible and—mirabile dictu—rather gripping.

One actually lays the book down feeling rather fond of Bathsheva and David, shaken by their odyssey, and wishing them well.

Only a novelist on the way to accomplishing her potential could have pulled that off for this grumpy old man. So let’s give credit where it’s due.