Book Review: ‘The Human Scale,’ by Lawrence Wright

THE HUMAN SCALE, by Lawrence Wright

There is a verse in the Talmud that reads “Whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the world.” This assertion is echoed in Islam. In the Quran, it is written, “If anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he had saved the lives of all mankind.”

This parity should come as no surprise. Jews and Muslims are, in Islamic terms, ahl al-kitab, or “people of the book.” From the omnipotence of the one God to the sanctity of one life, Judaism and Islam distill much of the world’s complexity into this singular, absolute unit.

The loss of a single life — the murder of Jacob Weingarten, an Israeli police chief in a West Bank settlement — sets in motion Lawrence Wright’s gripping new novel, “The Human Scale.” The story centers on the relationship between Tony Malik, an Arab American F.B.I. agent, and Yossi Ben-Gal, a world-weary Israeli cop. When Tony arrives in Israel, he is rehabilitating after a terrorist-planted bomb nearly killed him. He has come to reconnect with his extended family at a wedding, but when Weingarten is murdered, Tony becomes involved in Yossi’s investigation, one that takes us right up to the Oct. 7 attacks.

Wright, whose many books include “The Looming Tower,” his nonfiction account of the events leading up to 9/11, uses the murder investigation as a tool to examine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In an author’s note at the end of the book, he writes, “One cannot hope for an end to the strife without acknowledging the separate histories that each side claims.” Wright’s characters represent a wide variety of histories and perspectives. These include Sara, Yossi’s daughter, who is home from her studies abroad in France and pleads with her father to leave Israel and the conflict there, as well as radicalized agitators on either side.

Stendhal wrote that “politics in a literary work is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.” The politics in this book are impossible to ignore; indeed, they’re the point. Although Wright is thorough in his recounting of key elements of the conflict, even name-checking historical figures like Moshe Dayan and intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, he weaves these details into his story in a way that is neither vulgar nor overly didactic. Wright’s focus is on the tangible, the personal.

“The Human Scale” is set in Hebron, a place Wright clearly knows well from his work as a journalist. It focuses on specific pieces of land, including Tony’s family farm and an ancient olive grove. “They would push Arabs out of Hebron, and then out of the West Bank altogether,” Yossi thinks after witnessing a violent exchange between Israeli settlers and Palestinians. “It was a fantasy, an Arab land without Arabs, just like Hamas dreaming of the Holy Land without Jews.” Ideological fantasies are as important to understanding the conflict as are the geographic and political realities that have defined it for a century. Wright gives each their due.

In one scene, Sara considers the balance between Jewish and Arab lives. She recalls writing a paper about the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who Hamas captured in 2006 and later released in a prisoner exchange. Sara wonders:

But what about this one Jewish individual, “this shy boy with a nervous smile and studious disposition,” as his father described him, who loved basketball and excelled in physics — was the life of Gilad Shalit worth more than a thousand Palestinians?

She titles her paper “The Human Scale.”

But Sara is of two minds about her Israeli identity. As she imagines returning to France for her studies, she dreads the hostility she feels living as a Jew outside Israel. “And I remind myself that this is where the guillotine stood,” she tells another character. “Housewives of Paris would sit beside the scaffold, knitting, as the heads of the aristocrats plopped into the basket. I imagine these charming streets, with their cafes and bibliothèques, running with blood.”

Who are they to judge her? she adds. “We are all barbarians in our time.”

Wright’s visceral depiction of the Oct. 7 attacks at the novel’s climax forces us to weigh the value of a single life against another, to engage in this conflict that has turned into a human scale. Given the passions raging around the current war in Gaza, Wright’s book is a gutsy one to write. To fail as a novelist and become a partisan of one side would read as a betrayal not only of the opposing side, but also of what the best literature does: It both asserts and reconciles our humanity through perspectives that may be far from our own. Wright succeeds in this complex, deeply felt work. He shows that if it is possible to save mankind one life at a time, as the Talmud and Quran affirm, then maybe it is also possible to save our humanity, one story at a time.

THE HUMAN SCALE | By Lawrence Wright | Knopf | 425 pp. | $30