Dinner at the Center of the Earth

7

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the world is burning pile of garbage. It’s not even relegated to one area or continent; it’s every corner of the Earth. But the longest and most intractable fire seems to be the Middle East. More pointedly Israel and Palestine. Granted, 2025 has brought us a whole new level of discord and fuckery. And here sat Dinner at the Center of the Earth in my rather robust book queue for the last several years — a novel from 2018 that feels just as relevant and visceral now some seven years later than it ever has. In some ways more so, only because the scales have tipped so severely since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent disproportionate dismantling and destruction of Gaza and functional murder of thousands of innocent civilians. It’s all just terrible and bad. There are no good guys here. There are no winners.

Maybe if I do this with more books — let them moulder on the shelf — their relevance will come back around. Seems almost all dystopian fiction has certainly made its way back into our consciousness. No reason, of course. Just saying. But none at this moment points to the stalemate, the absolute uselessness of the Israel/Palestine situation than something like this novel. Which is part spy novel, part historical fiction and several parts meta fiction. I wouldn’t put it in the surrealistic allegory category like Buddha’s Little Finger or Kafka or anything, but at times the totally plausible intractable situations seem like they couldn’t possibly be realistic or Earth bound.

Our protagonist, Z, is a nice American Jewish boy whose life has unraveled to the point that he’s in a solo cell in a black site in the Negev desert in Israel. Not a Hammas hole, mind you. A seemingly friendly power holding him with no exit. No end. How did this all come about? Well, his altruistic move to Israel in order to be part of the peace process became “intelligence” work, which becomes spying, which becomes being complicit with Israel and The General’s (Ariel Sharon) plan to “win” that peace. Winning in terms of winning. Not peace. His conscience eventually overrides his loyalty to the Israeli state, leading to a betrayal and the Palestinian side winning their own victory in the offing. Which subsequently leads to him being on the run from his own people, eventually getting snagged by his own bosses and thrown in an unending prison of his own making. Englander basically setting up this kind of snake eating its own tail situation where any attempt to give grace to or fight for the moral high ground only leads to more death and destruction. This theme is encapsulated by Z’s (then known as Prisoner Z) guard in his black site prison after years of rotting away and forming a personal bond when asked if maybe he would just free him: “How did taking an idiotic moral stand work out for you?” It’s a pretty pessimistic outlook, but what else could we expect from a seemingly impossible conundrum?

Englander tells the story of Z by mixing it with real life players in the Israeli / Palestinian conflict, flashing back and forth in time mostly between 2002 and 2014. The aforementioned General, a stand-in for real-life former general and prime minister, Ariel Sharon, spends a good deal of the book (from around 2006 to 2014) in a coma. The mighty voice of a certain era of Israel and a man whose legacy — at least on the surface — seemed to make a 180 from Zionist warrior to man of peace. Or at least a man with a plan that expelled Jewish settlers from Gaza and moved in some significant way toward a plan to create a land for Palestinians. The question is, what was politics and what was the reality of his true feelings? And then he was felled by fatness. That’s not an actual medical diagnosis, but he was a man of large appetites and basically ate himself into a vegetative state right when things were looking like they were heading in the right direction. Which was also an unfortunate situation for our friend Z, who came out on the wrong end of the General right before he personally had him thrown in a secret forever prison and then immediately turned into a vegetable for eight years and died. Sucks when the only dude who knows you’re still alive hasn’t spoken for almost a decade and then croaks without being able to mention to anyone he tossed an American former Mossad spy into a hole in the desert that only he knows about.

Englander’s plot feels a bit scattered and almost dreamy at times. We’re in characters’ heads and he is clearly using a bit of literary license to illustrate the completely impossible swirl of the Israel conundrum as we bop back and forth in time and location. But he also injects some concrete spy, political and historical details that help ground the story in reality. He really does find a great balance to both show the absurdity of the situation, but also the desperation and altruism on both sides. The fact that good people can do bad things out of loyalty and sometimes just because they think they’re doing the right thing. But that even the good things they try to do are often met with counters that undermine or take advantage of that good deed. I’d call his approach fair and balanced in its skepticism and resignation that unlocking something that would truly work for both sides is almost a cruel unreality. Even when it seems like there’s a perfect solution, nobody is able to admit to it. And so it goes.