A heartbreaking work of staggering illumination

Everything Is Illuminated
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Perennial Books, 276 pages
Available at National Book Store

Remember when memoirs used to be written by those who had lived long, interesting lives? This notion was challenged by celebrity memoirs that merely celebrated notoriety (such as Monica Lewinsky’s). Then along came Dave Eggers, whose precocious 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, blended hyperbole, irony and real-life tragedy in its tale of a 26-year-old whose parents die almost simultaneously of cancer, leaving him responsible for raising a younger brother.

Eggers performed an audacious juggling act in that book, milking reader sympathy while alternately skewering his generation’s self-absorption and extolling the same as a virtue. He also encouraged a new breed of writers, many of whom adopted the memoir form as a mutable, experimental plaything. Who needed truth when you had imagination and chutzpah?

Enter Jonathan Safran Foer, a precocious peer of Eggers’, who gained literary attention with his 2002 novel, Everything is Illuminated, which seemed like a memoir – following, as it did, a character named Jonathan Safran Foer who tracks down a woman in a Ukraine village who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

But the story is 100 percent invented.

Lacking any solid information about his grandparents other than a faded, yellowing photograph, Foer failed to obtain the truth about their World War II experience. So he did the next best thing: he invented a history for them, which is told in the alternating chapters of Everything is Illuminated.

First we meet Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who accepts a job guiding the American Foer through a modern-day Ukraine. With his butchered English syntax ("I was effervescent to go to Lutsk and translate for Jonathan Safran Foer. It would be unordinary."), his cranky grandfather recruited as driver, and a dog named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior tagging along as company, Alex spins his side of the journey while the author’s namesake tells the rambling history of Trachimbrod, a mythical, fictional shtetl (Yiddish for "village") that begins in 1791 and winds up in the present.

Here, Foer charts a furious love of life in his imaginary village, including the silly and the mundane, the petty and the passionate, and the progress of a young girl – a fetus, actually – who is born when a horse cart plunges into the river Brod, the mother giving birth before drowning. (This is obviously not realism we’re dealing with here.) The girl is named Brod, and is destined to become the great-great-great-great-great grandmother of Foer.

This part of Everything is Illuminated is sink or swim, hit or miss, love it or hate it. There’s so much convoluted fantasy that the tale tends to grow quite shaggy; there’s an unwelcome air of magic realism about it all. But the fact that a major part of Everything is Illuminated takes place in a shtetl shouldn’t necessarily deter readers. Other popular works of fiction have been set in shtetl-like locales (Fiddler on the Roof, Yentl). Foer posits two separate Jewish factions – the Uprights and the Slouchers, and seems to side with the latter, who chronicle shtetl dream life in The Book of Recurrent Dreams. There you will find "the dream of sex without pain," "the dream of perpetual motion," "the dream of disembodied birds," and "the dream that we are our fathers":

4:525–I walked to the Brod, without knowing why, and looked into the reflection in the water, I couldn’t look away. What was the image that pulled me in after it? What was it that I loved? And then I recognized it. So simple. In the water I saw my father’s face, and that face was the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we are created. We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered – our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure…

There is lots of poetic musing in this first novel, lots of philosophical waxing (as in the Book of Antecedents section). But there’s also a lot of powerful writing, and a strategic method behind the seeming whimsy. And for what it’s worth, Foer’s novelistic enterprise resonates more deeply than Eggers’ memoir, which seemed at times like a self-serving stunt. It helps that Foer – also 26 years old – tackles the Holocaust, and the fate of Ukrainian Jews during the war. Just when you think his self-indulgent tack will lead him down a frivolous path, he reels you back into the real world with themes straight out of Sophie’s Choice.

On the other side of the story is Alex, the son of a cruel and largely absent father (the kind of dad who will calmly reach into the freezer to get some ice, then hand it to his son before smacking him in the head), and the grandson of a caustic widower who harbors his own secrets about the Holocaust. Alex is the typical unreliable narrator: he fantasizes about life in America, overinflates his sexual conquests, and provides an ironically sharp mirror to Foer’s more literary embellishments. Much of the enjoyment of Alex’s chapters comes from an almost vaudevillian patter between translator and author, mostly revolving around Jonathan’s jewishness in a modern-day Ukraine that wears its anti-Semitism casually and on its sleeve.

"The shtetls weren’t only for Jews, so there should be others to talk to." "The whats?" "Shtetls. A shtetl is like a village." "Why don’t you merely dub it a village?" "It’s a Jewish word." "A Jewish word?" "Yiddish. Like schmuck." "What does it mean, schmuck?" "Someone who does something that you don’t agree with is a schmuck." "Teach me another." "Putz." "What does it mean?" "It’s like schmuck." "Teach me another." "Schmendrik." "What does it mean?" "It’s also like schmuck." "Do you know any words that are not like schmuck?"

Alex and Jonathan trade chapters by mail after the trip is over, and one subtext of Everything is Illuminated is the difficulty – maybe even the impossibility – of telling the truth in words. Foer doesn’t always overcome this obstacle in a novel that is partly circus act, partly heartbreaking testament. At times, readers may grow annoyed by Foer’s (and other Gen-X writers’) seeming preciousness, as if only his generation can bear proper witness to love, commitment, sex, sacrifice and other perennial human themes. Sometimes you wish the newer authors would show more instead of yakking on about their "engagement" with life. But then again, sometimes writing about – and bearing witness to – boredom and nothingness can be an accurate reflection of the human condition, as in the chapter from Everything is Illuminated that ends with the single phrase, "We are writing." Repeated 200 times.