Captives

Daniel Bloom is the kind of person who ends most social gatherings with an alternately raging and despairing conversation about the state of things. He is a screenwriter, a husband, and a father—pretty much in that order.

One day Daniel begins a new project, a revenge fantasy that envisions a nameless assassin taking down the bad guys—the corporate chiefs, the political flacks. And quickly, unmistakably, he realizes that his premise for the screenplay is too good: that he really does want these people to die, that his sense of hopeless impotence has reached a stage of spiritual crisis that’s no longer just a matter of vapid dinner-party conversation.

Where Daniel goes from there—to Israel and to the hospital, among other destinations—is no mere private odyssey: it is, in its peculiarly and ferociously personal way, the epic journey of our age.