RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewDinner at the Center of the Earth is a guilty pleasure — guilty because you wonder throughout if a book highlighting the endless cycles of trespass and vengeance that define the modern state of Israel should be quite so much fun ... Just when you think you’ve been swept into a political thriller with all the headlong energy of the Jason Bourne franchise or a romance viewed through a Vaseline-coated lens, Englander broadens the perspective and you’re back among the real and present depredations of history. Such radical shifts in mood and tone allow him the latitude to do what he’s always done best, in story after indelible story: depict individuals in their quixotic attempts to hang onto conscience, identity and hope while history tries to pry loose their tenuous grasp ... The closest concept the Jews have to limbo is Sheol, a place existing in a purgatorial realm between the poles of paradise and hell — much like, as some might say, the state of Israel itself. Each character in the novel embodies those extremes, oscillating between them, sometimes like a metronome, sometimes like a ticking time bomb ... While parallel lives might have to wait for infinity to converge, opposing narratives may be resolved in stories. And stories about the Promised Land, as this bold, compassionate, genre-hopping novel reminds us, have always traded in impossibility.
