The Silencer

Joe Dekel, an Israeli journalist, is in New York City to cover a special conference on Jewish-Palestinian peace. There he meets his ``Silencer,'' an American Jew who brooks no criticism of Israel, such as Dekel had expressed in a novel about Israel's invasion of Lebanon. When Dekel agrees (for reasons unknown) to meet his opponent in a warehouse, he finds the Silencer's boss instead--a man in charge of blacklisting ``Jewish and Israeli defeatists''--on the verge of death, his skull crushed. Dekel is drawn into a web of deceit and violence that takes him from the U.S. to Israel and back. The hardboiled Dekel's irreverent views about Middle East politics are often grotesquely funny, but the repetitious rhetoric about the Arab-Israeli conflict burdens a plot already overloaded with Dekel's paranoia--he believes everyone from the FBI to the Anti-Slander League is out to get him. And while Louvish ( The Therapy of Avram Blok ) successfully lures us into this paranoid world, he maintains such tight control over Dekel's thoughts that virtually nothing is left to the reader's imagination. (May)