At first glance, Amy Wilentz's "Martyr's Crossing" seems set up to embody, in one grand, sweeping tale, much of the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her choice of characters implies this: the handsome Israeli solider; the young, beautiful Palestinian mother; the calculating and patriotic Israeli old-timer; the angry, imprisoned Palestinian terrorist; and of course, at the center of it all, the child martyr. As the novel begins, these familiar figures stand poised to represent all the predictable sides of the story that they do on the evening news.

But it soon becomes clear that Wilentz has a more subtle, and complicated, story to tell. From the beautifully shaded opening scene in which a Palestinian mother tries to get her gravely ill child across an Israeli checkpoint, "Martyr's Crossing" unravels like a series of snapshots of interior life under great personal discord. Wilentz animates small, resonant moments -- the gossip in an Israeli cafe, the folding of a dead child's laundry, the gross vanity of an old Palestinian leader. Certainly, there are grand statements: Watching her father lying on his deathbed, Marina Raad, an American-born Palestinian who had returned to her romanticized origins, concludes that "we were all victims of history." Yet "history" serves less as a foundation for the story and more as worn scenery for people engaged in distinct struggles in a beloved, wretched homeland.

It's not an easy task to avoid stereotypes with this material, considering that the novel also conveys the harsh reality that it's all too easy for these characters to fall prey to their own illusions about what it means to be Israeli or Palestinian. Yizhar, an Israeli official responsible for putting a positive news spin on the actions of the Israeli army, imagines his country as "a rogue nation riding roughshod over others, trampling norms and shoving aside accepted wisdom. Small but scrappy." After his grandchild dies at the hands of Israeli soldiers, George Raad, an ailing Palestinian intellectual, pays a visit to his childhood house, which is now occupied by an Israeli family he once knew. As George grapples with his memories, he hears an insistent inner voice: "You have to pay some price for taking away my land and living in my house for fifty years and for eternity." It's as if what George experiences is more a reflex of reassurance than a reassertion of truth. The moment comes off as somehow both surprising and painfully obvious, as do many of Wilentz's sharp depictions of intricately layered pain.

The novel's success owes much to Wilentz's judicious crafting and her familiarity with the region. (She was the New Yorker's Jerusalem correspondent between 1995 and 1997.) At the end of "Martyr's Crossing," when the Israeli soldier stumbles into, of all places, a mosque, and George watches his life pass before him in, of all places, an Israeli hospital, it's a potentially predictable move to have the characters end up in the hands of their perceived enemy. But in Wilentz's masterful deployment of multiple characters tumbling toward a thrilling finale, their individual fates manage to seem like mere coincidences of geography. Or maybe it's that the first 300 pages of her book have already convinced the reader how inextricably tangled, like tree roots smothered in sidewalk cement, the fates of the Palestinians and the Israelis really are.

-- Suzy Hansen

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"