VICTORIOUS

A new novel by a celebrated Israeli writer.

Abigail is a military psychologist. As she treats patients and leads workshops for Israel Defense Forces personnel, she contends also with romantic liaisons, her father’s illness, and her only son’s imminent enlistment. As the novel goes on, it becomes clear that Abigail is not a very good therapist: She sleeps with a former patient, gives up on treating a troubled young man at the nadir of his mental health, and checks her text messages during a session. Moreover, we quickly learn that Abigail’s position is less noble than we might assume. She sees patients with PTSD, but rather than helping them deal with their trauma, Abigail believes her role is to make soldiers into the best and most efficient killers possible. In other words, her labor is for the benefit of the IDF, not the individuals that comprise it. This difference in philosophy causes friction with her father, also a psychologist, and ultimately (and unsurprisingly) comes to a crisis point when Abigail’s son joins the paratroopers and Abigail is forced to approach military psychology not just as an assistant to the army or as the one-time lover of a high-ranking general, but as a mother. As in his previous works, Sarid exposes a troubling element of Israeli culture in an oblique and clever manner. Sarid’s portrayal shows how even the humanity built into these systems intentionally (through the presence of mental health officers, for instance) and implicitly (through a mother-son relationship) cannot redeem the fundamentally inhumane institution of war. By focusing on an element of military culture that is supposedly intended to mitigate harm and showing how it fails to alleviate—and often even worsens—that harm, Sarid’s novel reveals the hollowness of the oft-touted claim that Israel has the “most moral army in the world.” The novel moves slowly and rather predictably, and as a result it sometimes struggles to maintain momentum, but Sarid’s incisive and unflinching social critique makes it worth reading. Though it's hard to finish this novel feeling positive about war or militaries, make no mistake: This is no screed and Sarid is no ideologue, and though his critique is bold, it is also fairly subtle.

A quietly scathing indictment of military culture.