-- First paperback edition. -- Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada -- the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than submit to Roman occupation in AD 73 -- who doubts a film both popular and honest on the subject can be made. Unfolding over the course of an airline flight, alternating between the perspectives of Jason, in first class with the film people, and his wife Lilia, in tourist class with their child, and intercut with the film script itself, Serpent is a modernist, elliptical masterpiece on the complex relationship between life and art. -- Serpent is the third book