Cynthia Ozick says:
The Tribalist, a magnetic, astute, and crucially engaged political novel by Louis Marano, is also an uncommon love story. It concerns the love of a man for a country not his own, and for a tradition he has not personally inherited through family descent. Embedded in a moral vision, it is a love that eventually will cost him his job, the esteem of his children, and the allegiance of the woman who shares his life -- and still it is a love that will strengthen and endure.
The country in question is contemporary Israel, always a focus of international contention. Swept away by the beauty of the land and the rooted revivification of its civilization, distressed by the hostile "narratives" that falsify its intent and meaning, Frank DiRaimo becomes a champion of the Jewish state: an elucidator of its recent history and a defender against its antagonists. And, chiefly, a friend of its people, both the ordinary and the extraordinary.
This may put you in mind of Exodus, Leon Uris's celebrated bestseller. Or, in rather more sophisticated literary company, it may remind you in part of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, a novel that also engages with the pulsating human heart of political independence. That The Tribalist is a brave novel goes without saying. It is brave for all the obvious reasons: its courage in taking on issues that continue to inflame the world's headlines, its delicacy of feeling in the face of barren unfeeling. But it is brave not only in its political stance, but in its deepest structural imperatives. Frank DiRaimo resembles a figure you will find in the great political novels, figures who argue, who contend, who expose, who inform: only recall Dostoyevsky's passionate expositors, or the bold gusts of reasoning in Conrad and Mann. A brave novel is one that permits its protagonist to think, and to think with complexity, and to speak out his thoughts unstintingly. A brave novel is one that solicits intellect and astonishes emotion. And a brave novel will decline to neuter itself by the unworthy yet commonplace belief that the purpose of political fiction is to "understand" hatred.
Louis Marano, a journalist and anthropologist, has given us a consummately brave novel.
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