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the ZIG ZAGkid: a novel TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY BETSEY ROSENBERG BY DAVID GROSSMAN FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX FICTION 308 PAGES BY DAVID L. ULIN | about halfway through David Grossman's fourth novel, "The Zigzag Kid," there's a moment that sums up the very nature of the book. It occurs during a conversation between 12-year-old Nonny Feuerberg, the narrator, and an old man named Felix Glick, who, we have just learned, is the greatest thief in the world. Although Nonny is the son of a policeman, he is traveling with Felix at what he believes is his father's instigation, as part of a rite of passage to celebrate his bar mitzvah, just a few days away. Besides, his father's girlfriend, Gabi, longs to own one of Felix's trademark calling cards -- a delicately wrought golden ear of wheat. As the boy recalls, "Gabi used to say, 'Felix Glick and Lola Ciperola! There's the winning combination! Bring me the purple scarf and the golden ear of wheat, Nonny, and with my one fairy-tale wish I will overcome the ill fate of a patty-cake face and win the prince's reluctant heart!'" Gabi's statement is a telling one, for "The Zigzag Kid" wants to be a literary fairy tale, a mix of fantasy and realism recording Nonny's voyage to the secrets of his heart. Opening with a lighthearted train trip from Jerusalem to Haifa, the novel veers from the commonplace after Nonny meets Felix and sets out on a series of adventures -- starting with a few petty larcenies and building until he's wearing disguises and hiding from the police. "My world kept changing," Nonny reflects. "Each minute what had happened to me during the past few days was lit up from a different angle, as though reality was not something solid and substantial but something pliant, elusive, variable." At issue is nothing less than Nonny's identity, an idea Grossman makes explicit by developing his story around the refrain, "Who am I?" This is something of a new direction for Grossman, who is one of Israel's most prominent writers; his previous works include "See Under: Love," a novel about the Holocaust, and "The Yellow Wind," a nonfiction investigation of the occupation of the West Bank. Like those books, however, "The Zigzag Kid" has at its core a quest for connection, as Nonny searches for his mother, Zohara, who died when he was a year old. Some of the book's most affecting moments, in fact, come when Nonny's journey leads him to retrace his parent's courtship and learn about the hidden passions of their lives. Here, Grossman's magical realist sensibilities are at their strongest, as Nonny finds the key to his past hidden within himself, as if encoded in his genes. For all that, though, "The Zigzag Kid" ultimately fails to compel, coming off as less than three-dimensional, and curiously unengaged. Partly this has to do with Grossman's fairy tale aesthetic, which gives the novel a contrived quality, as if its world were not quite real. More troubling is the lack of narrative tension; Nonny's most profound revelations are telegraphed pages in advance, and his path to self-awareness seems so uncontested, one wonders what the fuss is about. Even fairy tales, after all, require an element of danger, a sense that fundamental matters are at stake. Yet "The Zigzag Kid" lacks the merest hint of peril, without which Nonny's quest feels somehow insubstantial, like a chimera in empty air. Sept. 11, 1997 David L. Ulin lives in Los Angeles. He is at work on a book about Jack Kerouac. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html