A young man's dogged devotion

Beneath the dire headlines, good news from the Middle East: a delightful novel called "Someone to Run With," by David Grossman. The Israelis chose it for their most prestigious national prize and drove it up the bestseller list when it appeared in 2001. A year later, the Germans awarded it a prize of their own. And now, with this sprightly translation by Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz, it's time for Americans to fall in love with it, too.

When the story opens, 16-year-old Assaf is enduring a mind-numbing summer job in Jerusalem's sanitation department. Called away to the United States to deal with a romantic emergency involving his older sister, his parents have left him alone for the first time. But Assaf is too good or too timid to see these weeks of freedom as anything but uninterrupted tedium. Until a dog barks.

"Sometimes," Grossman writes, "it is so easy to determine the exact moment when something - Assaf's life, for instance - starts to change, irreversibly, forever."

The arrival of this lost mutt is such a moment, and it sets in motion a search that will draw Assaf - and us - through a harrowing and wonderful adventure. Unable to find anything else for him to do, his boss tells Assaf, "Do what we always do in such cases. Tie a rope to the dog and let it walk for a while, an hour or two, and it will lead you itself, straight and steady, to its owner."

In the tradition of supervisors everywhere, this advice is only partly accurate. The dog leads him all right, but their itinerary isn't straight or steady, and there's no walking involved. This charmingly discombobulated boy is pulled all over town in a kind of Kafkaesque comedy that wags through one crisis after another.

Everywhere he goes, people recognize the dog and ask what he's doing with it. A street vendor hands him a pizza and yells at him for being late - for what? A cloistered nun tells him there isn't much time to save the dog's owner - from what? A policeman assaults and arrests him - but why? It's that nightmare in which everyone else understands what part you're playing but you. Even the dog seems to know, but beyond pulling him through the streets of Jerusalem with unwavering determination, it won't tell him either.

Gradually, though, Assaf collects enough clues to understand that the dog's owner is a young woman in horrible peril and that he's her only chance for salvation - and that he's in love with her. What, after all, could be more chivalric than devotion to someone you haven't met? Moving from one level of this mystery to the next, he starts to imagine himself as the knight in a favorite computer game, a conceit that reminds us how innocent and naive he is even as he descends into seedy sections of Jerusalem that he never knew existed.

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