Reading, Writing, Thinking

I ask because one of the issues in Spies, which I finished last night, is young Stephen's Jewish identity. (Stephen is the first-person protagonist.) There's certainly no reason why a non-Jew couldn't write a book involving a Jewish protagonist or inquiring into questions of Jewish identity -- but I can't think of such a book by a Gentile. I suspect that most non-Jews aren't even much aware that there are such questions.
And yet the question is certainly on the table in the literary world. It's one of the fundamental questions of Philip Roth's work (yes, even Portnoy's Complaint, although not The Great American Novel), for one example. Never mind that Jews are a tiny minority of Americans; we are a larger minority of American writers and artists.
Of course, Frayn is a Brit. I'm more familiar with Victorian literature than contemporary British work, and in Victorian novels one finds a casual, thoughtless anti-Semitism. (Not that it doesn't show up in American novels of the same period; Edith Wharton's House of Mirth comes to mind, in which the heroine, toward the end, abases herself to the point of being nice to the Jewish financier.) That doesn't mean it persists. After all, the head of the Conservative Party is Jewish. (That doesn't mean it doesn't persist, either.)
Making Stephen Jewish does make him much more of an outsider than he would otherwise be, and that suits Frayn's purposes (it's also one of the reasons Jews are overrepresented in the arts). I think that makes me even more curious to know whether it was a calculated or intuitive choice.
The book, incidentally, stays marvelous to the end. A final, short chapter adds layers of meaning that slip into place, into the places prepared for them.