Much of the book takes place in an apartment building in northern Tel Aviv. Elsewhere in Tel Aviv, connected to the narrative intuitively rather than geographically, we look in on a silently thoughtful elderly man confined to a wheelchair and on Ezra and Ruth, a couple whose son has just gone AWOL from the Israeli army after punching out a sergeant. Oddly, this mosaic virtually never touches upon the political and theological issues that most of us in America associate with Israel. So bound up are Kenaz's characters in their mundane relationships that they don't notice, for example, the precariousness of their nation or the weight of Jewish history. Even plot takes a back seat to the pervasive angst in Returning Lost Loves , but when it enters the book it does so with startling swiftness.
Daily life goes on, and then, in the time it takes to blink, everything is different.
Even the book's title refers to a mystical story Gabi happens to overhear on a bus, and even within the story its protagonist happens, from a bus, to see a painted sign that changes her life. Yet O'Connor's prescription was intended to define the form he knew best, the short story, as opposed to the novel, and Returning Lost Loves reads like a collection of individual stories that have been elegantly shuffled by a master of the form. Returning Lost Loves displays the full emotional range of contemporary Tel Avivians, but it never takes the final step needed to make the inchoate cohere. This probably reveals the truth of life in modern-day Israel, or anywhere, but it doesn't quite add up. Kenaz, an intelligent and deeply empathic pointillist, focuses too much on his specific dots, and barely misses delivering the larger picture he certainly knows.