When you learn to shoot, you are taught to yield to the recoil. Don’t resist. Don’t anticipate. Let it move through you. The price of control is surrender. When a gesture is repeated enough, it hardens into meaning, a kind of narrative logic. And it is this logic – the juddering logic of recoil – that moves through Tehila Hakimi’s Hunting in America. Framed by a series of shooting day trips, the Israeli author’s debut novel is a study in cultural absorption: how violence enters the body and rewires the mind.
Hakimi’s narrator has just landed a job in her tech firm’s American office – some vague position in middle management. Officially, it’s a short-term posting; unofficially, it’s an escape plan. She is never going back to Israel, not if she can help it. We will never learn her name or the name of her new city. We will never learn what her firm builds or harvests or monitors. It hardly matters. For her, the real work is camouflage.
It is exhausting to master the pleasantries of the American workplace: the euphemisms, the half-asks, the unvoiced expectations. The woman adds extra sugar to her emails; softens her accent; stretches her smile so wide she can barely recognize her face in mirrors (“the smile I’d acquired in Israel had something gloomy about it, something incomplete”). She has arrived in midwinter and the anonymous city is buried in snow. The world is white – her apartment, her food; a relentless, obliterating blandness.
Only hunting breaks the monotony. The woman’s boss, David, has access to private woodland, and he invites her to join him for a weekend of deer-stalking. At first, the gesture feels less like camaraderie than some kind of test, but the woman is a former IDF soldier. It has been twenty years since she last fired a shot, but her body remembers. “One thing was clear to me”, she explains. “If I concentrated hard enough, the bullet would hit whatever I wanted it to hit.”
The weekend hunts become a ritual, and then a kind of loaded foreplay (“I released my bullet precisely when he did … We fired in perfect unison”). David has lost someone to a stray bullet; the narrator screams in her sleep. What they find in each other looks like comfort, but it is a standoff in disguise. The more they hunt, the harder it is for the woman to distinguish human from animal. Back at the office, talk of downturns and job cuts put them both in the corporate crosshairs.
The rifles gleam and the deer bleed, but Hunting in America is a workplace novel at heart. Hakimi belongs in the literary company of Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End, 2007), Olga Ravn (The Employees, 2020) and Katharina Volckmer (Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes, 2025) – chroniclers of the slow extractive violence of overtime. In his cult novel Microserfs (1995), Douglas Coupland described white-collar cubicles as “veal-fattening pens”. For Hakimi, the office is less like a factory farm than a hunting blind – a place where power waits patiently for a clean shot. The language of the hunt bleeds easily into the language of productivity: targets, headcounts, eliminations. Joanna Chen’s translation preserves these cold-blooded cadences – the efficient cruelties and cruel efficiencies.
Hunting in America wants to be a novel of American gun culture. “Most of my co-workers possessed firearms at home”, the narrator marvels, “some even kept a gun in the trunk. There were also a few who kept a small pistol in the glove compartment.” Guns are as casual here as coffee mugs, a shortcut to belonging. In a sporting megastore, she sees the weapon she once carried in uniform packaged for civilian fun; bullets displayed like jewellery. Hakimi doesn’t add much to what we already know – or believe we know – about gun-drunk Americans. But the US has always been a surface on which others cast their shadows. What comes into view instead, quietly and unmistakably, is Israel: the country the narrator is fleeing; the country that “smells like a carcass”; that put the muscle memory of an M16 into her hands. Just as Hakimi never tells us what the tech firm does, she never tells us what her government does. She only hints at the machinery, the quiet violence required to keep it all moving. “You have no idea what they’re capable of”, the narrator is warned about senior management. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t need to.
Recoil moves backwards, away from the blast. Hunting in America was first published in Hebrew in May 2023, five months before the massacre on October 7 and the ensuing destruction of Gaza. The recoil of the past two years rattles through its silences, its evasions and deferrals, its blind spots and cruelties. There is a shot the woman takes – alone, in the snow – that has ugly consequences. The question that haunts her is whether she meant to take it. That same irresolvable question haunts this novel. Some of its grotesqueries are deliberate. History has written the rest.
Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic
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