It's no surprise that, in a market awash with unread 'good' books, 25-year-old newcomer Jonathan Safran Foer chose to add to the growing oeuvre of what I like to call 'totally awesome titles that make me actually want to read the damned thing' with his literary debut "Everything Is Illuminated." But Foer is no one trick pony-after reading his book for the first time (and you will read it many times over, trust me) you'll find out why the critics praise it to the skies, and why they would have done so even if it were called "What I Did On My Summer Vacation."
The amount of favorable press Foer has received is, in fact, slightly daunting. Picked up on the basis of a segment from "Everything Is Illuminated" that was published in the New Yorker's 2001 "Debut Fiction" issue, the novel garnered a very tidy advance and many accolades for its young writer, ranging from Joyce Carol Oates (his advisor at Princeton, but I'm sure that didn't factor into her decision at all) to the notoriously skittish New York Times.
This, as you may imagine, made me very much want to hate it, despite the trippy title. Foer's back story made me want to hate him too. Only a junior in college when he took the trip to Eastern Europe to look for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazi occupation, Foer found nothing in the way of personal history and thus proceeded to write "Everything Is Illuminated" in the space of one month. He was 20 years old. He does graciously add the caveat that the first sentence took him an entire week to write. Forget my own jealousy, I'm sure some well-established writers are gunning for him right about now.
The playboy's tale
It's very difficult to hate, dislike, or even feel lukewarm about "Everything Is Illuminated." The novel starts with such exuberance, such fast-paced humor and irresistible energy, that before you know it, you've gathered a crowd around you, people poking and prodding, asking what's so funny? Trying to explain is hopeless, not because Foer is difficult or heady, the opposite in fact, but you invariably collapse into hysterical laughter before you can finish reading the passage aloud.
The most outright laugh-out-loud funny section of the novel is narrated by Alexander Perchov, a native of Ukraine (the "totally awesome former Soviet Republic") and a self-described "potent and generative" playboy who loves "disseminat[ing] very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa." Foer's deft handling of Alex's writing style should be commended as it is, like with most successful styles, not immediately noticeable since it reads so naturally-one almost believes English is Foer's second tongue just like Alex's. Unlike, say, Burgess' "Clockwork Orange," you don't need an appendix or knowledge of a foreign language to understand Alex, only the ability to understand language at its most literal. Indeed, Alex sounds like a particularly precocious 11-year-old who has accidentally stumbled upon his father's "English for Businessmen" dictionary and swallowed it whole. We get words like "don" for wear, "rigid" for hard, "promenade" for walk, "disseminate" for spend-but the most surprising and effective aspect of this technique is how quickly we fall into its pacing and pattern. Obviously Alex's psychosomatically blind grandfather (also named Alex, as is Alex's father) owns an "officious seeing-eye bitch" bought from the home for "forgetful dogs."
The novel's plot picks up when we find out Alex and his family run Heritage Tours, an organization that helps Jews from the West rediscover their family roots through guided expeditions into various Eastern European shtetls. Enter the half-fictitious alter-ego of Jonathan Safran Foer: Jonathan Safran Foer himself. Jonathan is looking to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis (though the parallels between Foer and his alter-ego are plentiful, finding and cataloguing the similarities is ultimately fruitless-the novel goes beyond easy games with doubles and doppelgangers), a woman he only has one picture of and whose name may or may not be Augustine. Alex is "effervescent to go to Lutsk and translate for Jonathan Safran Foer," as it "would be unordinary" and so their journey of mistakes and revelations begins.
If the revelations make up the heart of the novel, the brunt of the emotionality so to speak, then the mistakes and anecdotes recounted by Alex in his narrative could be considered its comic relief. And while it is certainly possible to write off some of the more absurd events as a young writer's wish to entertain his reader, it is possible and ultimately more fruitful to enjoy those passages as a gentle critique on the split between Old World and new and the far-reaching influence of America on the world's culture.
Though Alex portrays himself as a worldly man, someone whose dream is to one day go to an accounting school in the U.S., when he is confronted with someone so truly American as Jonathan, the culture gap is made explicit. Sometimes this gap leads to some genuinely inspired scenes-when Jonathan announces he is a vegetarian, Alex can't seem to wrap his head around the concept: "Pork?" "No." "Meat?" "No meat." "Steak?" "Nope." "Chickens?" "No." "Do you eat veal?" "Oh God, absolutely no veal." "What about sausage?"
Jonathan ends up ordering potatoes which obviously come with a side of meat.
At other times, the frustration over the breakdown of communication is heartbreakingly poignant. After meeting Jonathan, Alex confesses he usually considered Jews to have "shit between their brains" but now he sees that Jonathan at least is an "ingenious Jew." Alex obviously has no understanding of the significance of his statement, its historically-loaded meaning (the stereotypical sly Jew), but we do, and therefore can't help but doubt the sincerity of Alex and Jonathan's friendship, whatever communication they have managed to establish simply does not go far enough. There is no meeting of the minds, no bridging the cultural gap, and when their friendship disintegrates at the end of the novel, it seems almost inevitable.
A double-ended narrative
The remaining sections of the novel are split between a lyrical, almost folkloric retelling of Jonathan's family's history set in the fictional shtetl of Trachimbrod, editorial suggestions from Alex to Jonathan on those historical sections in the form of personal, highly entertaining letters, and the continuation of Alex's own story in Alex's uniquely hilarious voice. Working in an exceptionally intuitive though anti-linear fashion, the novel's main two sections race towards the present though from opposite sides, merging in the climactic scene of the novel, the scene where Jonathan, Alex, and Alex's grandfather finally meet the last remaining survivor of Trachimbrod–a woman they name Augustine despite her vigorous assertions to the contrary.
At times, the re-imagined Trachimbrod sections do sometimes read too much like "Marquez-lite," (Foer admits reluctantly to having been a great fan of "Love in the Time of Cholera") but the sheer ingenuity and brilliant energy make the complaint almost moot. Granted, some of Foer's stylistic choices began to grate on me. For instance, The Well-Regarded Rabbi from the Trachimbrod section speaks in all capitals. To give Foer some credit, this approach worked most of the time, but you wonder if it's not a form of laziness instead of ingenuity. Although I have to admit I am old-fashioned in that respect and hate it when characters' voices are differentiated by typeface instead of tone, what's frustrating about Foer's use of this technique is that he in no way needed to resort to it, the Rabbi's voice is perfectly clear, with enough quirks to make him a character without using distinctive typography as a crutch.
There are concepts, like the "Double House," a building erected by a man with "more money than there were things to buy," which are perhaps too easily rendered in Foer's dreamy prose, but then we come to passages in the same section that are so beautiful it make you ache. Passages full of a sort of 'Jewish Sensibility,' if I can be permitted such a broad remark, but which ring true to every reader.
With a novel about the Holocaust and its lingering effects, memory is an unavoidable theme. Memory here is deftly tied to the body-in one of the funniest passages in the book where the village fool ties a string around his index finger then another string around his pinky to remember the index finger and so on, ending up completely bound in string-to physicality and to sex. And this novel is packed full of all those things, including some pretty lewd, utterly hilarious asides. (When Little Igor, Alex's brother asks him about the position 69, Alex explains it is called that because it was invented in the year 1969. "What did people do before 1969?" Little Igor asks innocently. "Merely blowjobs and masticating box," replies Alex in full seriousness, "but never in chorus.")
Memories of the Holocaust
Foer is not scared of being funny, even when he is tackling issues like lingering anti-Semitism or rape, and he gets away with it because of his earnest and completely sincere faith in his own writing.
Nor is he scared of his talent, and this is refreshing. What carries the novel through some of its rougher parts is exactly that confidence in language-the whole concept of 'belatedness,' those paralyzing worries rampant among young (and not-so-young) writers-hasn't this already been done? and better than I could ever hope?-are swept aside in favor of a truly invigorating quest for meaning.
Which is not to say that Foer avoids engaging in some intelligent and highly emotional issues. When Alex and Jonathan find the woman they wish was Augustine, she tells them the Holocaust is "not a thing you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining," effectively summarizing an idea it took the documentary Shoah over nine hours of footage to achieve. Maybe there can be nothing beyond the Holocaust, maybe Celan was right, the only way out might be suicide, physical or emotional-and certainly that option is taken up by Alex's grandfather who still cannot get over his memories of his part in the murder of the Jews.
It is the act of remembering that is important, not the what, as Didl S the narcoleptic potato farmer points out. And what immediate poignant significance this has for us, for the third-generation removed from WWII and its death camps, especially in the face of the imminent death of the first-generation survivors. We must remember, but we have nothing to remember except half-forgotten tales told by half-forgotten grandparents or media images picked up from Hollywood-what else can we do but reinvent?
Repetition of the kind Foer engages in makes real what is only the ghost of a memory of a memory, or of what was never true but should have been. When Alex's grandfather starts to remember his part in betraying his best friend, a Jew, to the Nazis his speech degenerates into a violent flow of words with no punctuation, heavily dependant on repetition as a stylistic device: "... I am so afraid of dying I am soafraidofdying Iamsoafraidofdying I amsoafraidofdying and I said he is a Jew who is a Jew the General asked and Herschel embraced my hand with much strength and he was my friend he was my best friend I would have let him kiss Anna and even make love to her but I am I and my wife is my wife and my baby is my baby do you understand what I am telling you I pointed at Herschel and said he is a Jew this man is a Jew …"
We are far enough, Foer seems to be saying, from the pain of the war to acknowledge it but still too close to call it quits. The desire to judge, the anger, all these are still with us, but with the added onus of having no one to blame and nothing concrete to remember. It's a strange, unsavory mix of regret and a tabloidesque hunger for rumor and disgrace-an unknowable, untellable sorrow …
Did I mention that this book is funny? Reviewers greater than I have mentioned Foer's confidence in his readers, his belief in our intelligence, and I can only heartily agree. Because though all I have mentioned (and much much more) is an essential part of the narrative, Foer resists from hitting us over the head with it repeatedly. We're left to tease out meaning from the novel, just as we are expected to do with Alex's unusual style of speaking; and the rewards, in both cases, are immeasurable.