Out of the whirlwind

The most successful novel of the year, indeed the most successful debut novel in many years, begins with the murder of a teenage girl. To a nation bathed in grief from Sept. 11 and terrorized by stories of child abductions, "TheLovelyBones" offers a voice of bittersweet reassurance about the immortality of our loved ones.

Is there room, at this moment, for another intensely spiritual novel that opens with the murder of a teenage girl? If not, make room. "In the Image," by Dara Horn, is a work of raw genius.

Whereas "The Lovely Bones" glimmers with New Age faith in the ongoing presence of our dearly departed, Horn's novel storms with the crosscurrents of the Old Testament: the trials of exile, the burdens of orthodoxy, the inexplicable nature of evil, and the awesome power of God.

What interests Horn most, though, is the perplexing function of images – from the divine image that the Hebrew Scriptures first sanctify as man to the graven images later forbidden in the Commandments.

When a young man hits Naomi Landsmann in the first paragraph of "In the Image," she and her killer vanish from the pages of this novel. Her parents move away before we learn anything about them. If the driver suffers the effects of guilt or receives punishment, we never hear. If Naomi's parents find comfort in their faith or sever their marriage on the razor of grief, we never know. If Naomi awakens in heaven or returns to haunt her murderer, we never see. This is not a novel about them.

Instead, Naomi's death brings together an unlikely pair: her best friend, Leora, who reacts by becoming mute, and Naomi's grandfather, Bill, who attempts to capture everything on earth, past and present, in thousands and thousands of carefully organized slides.

Eleven months after his granddaughter's murder, Bill calls Leora and asks her to come see his photos of the Holy Land. It's a peculiar invitation – young Leora, after all, has never met this old man – but she and her parents go along for a pleasant if somewhat boring evening at the Landsmanns' house.

Later, he invites her alone, and she feels strangely inclined to keep viewing his well-narrated travelogues. Leora and Bill are both tourists, after all. Naomi's death has dislodged them from the continuum of normal life and forced them to look at their surroundings as a series of separate frames or panels in a long, foreign journey. But their mutual loss never develops into mutual affection, and eventually, Leora grows uneasy with his attempts to cast her as his missing granddaughter. In response to his increasingly uncomfortable revelations of past disappointments, she finally tells him off and they never meet again.

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