Everybody’s Hero: A Book for Our Times

Everybody’s Hero, the new novel from Dr. Alex J. Sinclair, is narrated by a serial killer whose plans are interrupted when, by chance, he becomes a national hero, everybody’s hero, after he saves the person he was planning to murder when someone else attacks her first. It’s a fast, fun, page-turner whose protagonist could be a 21st-century Israeli version of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and whose point of view you can’t help but adopt as your own while you’re reading it. I think Everybody’s Hero is fantastic, and I think you will too.

On a deeper level, the novel touches on the absurdity of media-driven fame, the irritations of everyday life, vigilante justice, and perhaps broader societal and political issues in Israel and the Middle East, but if you read it as nothing but a clever story with many twists and turns, it will be worth your time for that alone.

I conducted the following interview via email with Dr. Sinclair, who lives in Modi’in, Israel.

As entertaining as your new novel is, parts of it–some might argue all of it–are very dark. What made you want to write a book like this?

Well, it was cheaper than therapy! It’s dark, but I had such fun writing it. I kind of took the worst, most awful parts of myself, perhaps of all of us, and said, okay, what if I dialed those up to an eleven, what would that look like? And I came up with Zeke Stein, the protagonist of the book. He’s an awful, sociopathic character, but there’s something about him that you can’t quite dismiss. I sometimes like to describe Zeke as “Dexter meets Monica Geller” – he’s an evil sociopath, but motivated by a weirdly earnest desire for rules and order, come what may. I hope that reading the novel is like driving past a car crash – it’s terrible, but you just have to keep on looking!

Do you have a dog?

I’m a cat person.

To my mind, living in America, this book could have been set in the United States with hardly any changes. Why did you choose to set it in Israel?

You’re right. I actually have a version of the book on my hard drive that is basically identical, except with the location changed to the U.S. That version works just fine: Zeke can be a commentary on the malaise of modern-day America just as much as modern-day Israel. And some folks advised me to use the U.S. setting to make it more relatable to a wider audience. But I guess at the end of the day, I live in Israel, it’s my home, and I want to write about life here.

Your first book was a brilliant non-fiction examination of how we educate our kids about Israel, Loving the Real Israel. Do you see any connection between the themes of that book and the themes of your new novel?

As you said in your introduction, the book works as a psychological thriller on its own (that’s why it could have been set in the U.S. too). And to be honest, when I was writing it, I didn’t have any wider allegories in mind. But when it was done, or close to being done, I began to think that some might read it as a kind of commentary on Israel: its struggles with genuine, serious problems, but its excessive responses to those problems; its sometimes-absurd self-justifications, but its instincts which are, at heart, good; and how all those complexities bounce against each other. But I wouldn’t want to push the allegory too far. So I leave that open to the reader. Do with it what you will.

The aftermath of October 7, the ensuing events on college campuses, and the reactions of some Jewish students, parents, and Jewish organizations could be seen as validation for everything you prescribed in Loving the Real Israel. Yet Hamas’s attack on October 7 and the Gaza War seem too recent and raw for many of us to process, and many of us are jumping to one extreme or another—Hamas’s atrocities justify any Israeli response or Israel’s reaction calls into question the justification for Zionism itself. How do you suggest we think about these issues?

We’re in a very difficult time right now. It’s like that scene from the first Star Wars movie, where Luke, Han, Leia and Chewbacca are in the trash compactor of the Death Star, and the walls slowly start grinding in on them. On one side, we’re being crushed by the unholy alliance between the so-called progressive left and extremist Muslims, who call to “globalize the intifada” (they could save a lot of paint by just writing “kill Jews” instead) and deny Israel’s very right to exist. On the other side are the extremist Jewish fundamentalists who dream of a Third Temple, who boasted about committing war crimes in Gaza, and who are doing outrageous and despicable acts in the West Bank on a daily basis. And we – mainstream Jews, who believe in Israel’s right to survive and thrive, who know that the charge of genocide is tendentious and malevolent, but who also know, in our bones, that a lot of what Israel is doing just isn’t right… well, we’re stuck in the middle, desperately trying to press against both of those walls of the trash compactor before we get suffocated.

Do you think you’ll write a sequel to this novel, your previous novel, Perfect Enemy, or Loving the Real Israel?

I am working on a new non-fiction book that will build on Loving the Real Israel. It kind of starts from that Death Star trash compactor idea and sets out a pathway for how we push back against both walls. When it’s ready, you, Steve, will be one of the first to know!

Things seem gloomy, to put it mildly, in both Israel and the U.S. Doomscrolling has never been easier. What do you say to those who are losing hope or have lost hope?

I struggle with that myself. It is hard to find hope these days. But the deal on the table right now – full normalization with the entire Arab world, in return for a credible pathway to a deradicalized Palestinian state – well, that is a deal that we dreamed about for the first decades of Israel’s existence, and it’s a deal that we should be accepting with open arms. It’s a deal that the protagonists in the Gaza war – Hamas on one side, and the fundamentalist right wing in Israel (not that I am making a moral equivalency) – both oppose, but ironically, their actions before and during the war have brought that deal closer than ever before. So that’s what we should all be striving for with every sinew of our Jewish beings. And it’s still possible.

When you’re not writing, what are you reading for fun and/or for information that you’d recommend to others?

When I want pure escapism I go back to the Jeeves and Wooster novels of P.G. Wodehouse. It’s the written equivalent of comfort food. In terms of information, it’s not reading, but I find the Hartman Institute’s podcast For Heaven’s Sake to be enormously helpful in terms of navigating the current moment. And, of course, your newsletter!

Everybody’s Hero can be purchased on Amazon.com, bn.com, or anywhere books are sold online.

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