Midway through Life on Sandpaper, the fictional memoir of Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk's time in 1950s bohemian New York, after nearly two hundred pages of befriending (and sometimes bedding) famous musicians, painters, actors, and directors, Kaniuk admits that he didn't fit in. "I was in the lives of these people by mistake . . . I was passing through." It's a strange admission for an artist so clearly on the make, someone endorsed by Meyer Schapiro, someone who appeared destined for fame  or, at the very least, a post-obscurity revival of interest. But we hear another version of this pronouncement at the end of the book when Kaniuk is told by a close friend, "For you New York could have been a new homeland, but you missed out on it." While the sentiment is the same, there's a noticeable difference. To "miss out" indicates that there was the possibility of belonging, even as the memoir persistently suggests that he could never find another homeland.

Life on Sandpaper is a good, if very uneven, book that will enthrall at least some readers with its amazing sense of motion while leaving others frustrated by the lack of a plot, incomplete character development, and dubious veracity. For most of the book, Kaniuk is less the hero of his autobiography than he is a vehicle for painting or performing American culture in the 1950s, often leaving New York for the wilds of the West. This is On the Road as re-imagined by an Israeli, filled with chance encounters and memorable adventures that attempt to capture bohemian life in mid-century America.

The son of the first curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Kaniuk arrived in New York as an aspiring painter shortly after fighting in the 1948 War of Independence. He is drawn by the excitement of the city, by jazz, Beat poetry, and new kinds of painting. The dream of New York is a chance to transcend racial or ethnic origins through art, and there are moments when it looks like he'll succeed. Billie Holiday renames him "Yo," and writes a song called "Yo's Blues" in his honor. Later he is invited to paint his friend Charlie "Bird" Parker, the only painting, we're told, for which Parker ever sat. Marlon Brando sleeps under a portrait of Kaniuk's mother, while James Dean spends hours in the studio just watching Kaniuk paint. In Kaniuk's America, the drunk next to you at the lunch counter is liable to be James Agee, rambling semi-coherently about American decline. Most remarkably, all these luminaries accept Kaniuk. Even Agee, who refuses to look at Kaniuk's paintings because he is an Israeli colonialist, gives him a rare copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. If this all seems a bit fantastic, it probably is. The poet Hayden Carruth already publicly doubted some of Kaniuk's reminiscences years ago, describing the "absurdity" of one of his emotionally charged anecdotes.

Yet these unbelievable encounters with famous people are more than just great stories. (Though they are often emphatically that.) The use of real people helps to anchor Kaniuk's lively prose. Here he is describing Holiday:

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