A comic novel, a campus novel, a novel of ideas, and a novel of Jewish identity. If those four categories appeal to you at all, I can't recommend The Netanyahus enough. The novel is successful in each category. A deeply serious and intelligent account of the American-Jewish dilemma in the mid-twentieth century that, when it threatens to get too serious or intelligent, erupts in brilliantly funny set pieces. I frequently laughed out loud. The prose is smooth and, at times, gorgeous; Joshua Cohen is a very fine writer, reminiscent of early Saul Bellow.

The central question of The Netanyahus is the big question of Jewish identity, "the Jewish Question" (if I can call it that): how should a minority group thrive in perpetuity as a minority in unwelcoming lands which, as in Europe and throughout the Middle East, threaten their livelihoods and their very lives or, as in America, threaten to absorb and ultimately wash away their ancestral identity? The Zionist retort, that one should embrace nationalism and forge a homeland, is terrifyingly but convincingly argued, with all its warts and horrifying implications, by the perfectly realized character of Ben-Zion Netanyahu, a man who desperately needed to be the subject of a comic novel of Jewish identity. I can't believe it never occurred to me that this man belonged in a novel, but it occurred to Joshua Cohen, and I'm happy it did.