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Ah, the experimental novel. Those two words, “experimental novel,” are enough to make many of us uncomfortable, if not downright queasy. After years of dutifully suffering through the “important” works of young and not-so-young scribes trying their hand at “dealing with the novel post-James Joyce,” or “writing prose in the post-Hemingway manner,” or trying to confront the inane world through sardonic irony,” I was through. Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe lazy. Perhaps I never was the “intellectual” I thought I was.
I was beginning to think it was over. The novel, I mean. I hadn’t read anything that seemed different, yet good at the same time. I was frequently annoyed by the disdain that many authors seemed to have for everyone except themselves; in the guise of irony, some authors seemed to laugh at the reader for daring to attempt to read and understand their work. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest a few years ago seemed like the last straw. Was I doomed to reading the same books over and over again? Was there really nothing new? Was my world so devoid of content that the writers of my generation could look no further than their own petty lives, and snidely laugh at me, their reader?
When I picked up Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel Everything is Illuminated I had heard that this book was the new post-modern livre du jour; a funny, clever and promising first novel by a young student of Joyce Carol Oates. I was a bit leery as I scanned the dustjacket, looking for signs of smugness. I steeled myself against what I was sure to be an inevitable let-down, but committed to reading it anyway. Hope springs eternal, I suppose.
From the opening pages, I was wonderfully surprised. Roughly, the plot follows the search through Russia by an eponymously named character, Jonathan Safran Foer, for the woman who supposedly saved his grandfather from the Holocaust sixty years before. Foer has nothing but an old photograph to set him on the path to his quest. His only guides are Alex, his translator, and Alex’s father and grandfather, who are each along for the ride for very different reasons. Oh, and there is Alex’s grandfather’s troublesome dog, Sammy Davis Junior, Junior. This unlikely bunch moves between hilarity and heartbreak as they travel from Odessa to Trachimbrod, the site of Jonathan’s grandfather’s village.
Foer uses a dual narrative to tell his story, one in the present and one in the past that covers about three hundred years. Through this device, Foer creates a novel that plays with time in a way that is very post-modern, but unexpectedly entertaining as well.
The first is a series of letters to the character Foer by his ersatz Russian translator Alex, a young man struggling desperately to make an impression on Foer as he is to master the subtleties of English idioms. He fails at both, in a way that is both hilarious and tender. Here is how he introduces himself to us:
“My name is Alexander Perchov. But all my friends call me Alex, because it is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening me! because I am always elsewhere with my friends, and disseminating so much currency and performing so many things that can spleen a mother.”
In Alex, who tells the conventional story of the book, Foer (the author) creates a character that the reader can laugh at and also come to genuinely feel affection for. As the story progresses, we are able to see through the dual masks of Alex’s poor English and his put-on machismo to discover a troubled young man struggling in a different world.
Foer’s characterization of Alex relies heavily on the reader’s discovery of him; slowly we come to see Alex grow beyond what could have easily become a facile joke, much like the “Two Wild and Crazy Guys” created by Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s. Instead, we see him struggling to keep his family together and to help Foer (the character) achieve what seems to Alex like a heroic quest. Foer shows himself a master of fractured language that is both hilarious and revealing; we learn most about Alex as we are laughing the hardest. Alex is desperate, in a way that many of us are desperate, trying vainly to make his ordinary life into something romantic, something worthy of attention.
Foer continues this method of oblique characterization with Jonathan Safran Foer, the character. Seen only through Alex’s eyes, Foer (the character) emerges as something very different to the reader than the person Alex perceives and thinks he is relating in his narrative. In what I can only hope is an ironic comment on the much overused author-as-hero scenario, Foer (the character) comes into focus as a largely inert and fastidious character. He is shocked and repelled by the outrageous behavior of Alex and his family, and it seems Foer (the author) is mocking the delicate sensibilities of post-modern intellectuals through a fictional characterization of himself. He uses irony in a refreshingly self-deprecating way: by subtly mocking himself, debunking the authorial attitude that in the past has mocked the reader. Instead, Foer encourages his readers to take on a responsibility to find their own way through the book, to read and discover the characters as they emerge in the story.
The second part of the narrative is written in a style that owes much to the Yiddish folktales and tells the story of Trachimbrod, the Foer family’s shtetl, over the course of roughly three hundred years. These chapters are interleaved between Alex’s letters, and tell of the many events in the lives of Foer’s ancestors, beginning with the mysterious birth of his great-great grandmother, Brod. Each chapter in this narrative is told in a very indirect style, leaving out much that is only to be discovered later. Through these fables, Foer forces us to guess at what has happened and what will happen to the members of this Jewish community; like a spectre, the destruction of the Holocaust looms in their future as inevitably as Foer’s search to collect and understand the fragments of that wreckage which forces him into the lives of Alex and his family.
Alex, in a typical malapropism, gives us the title of the book. It is at once not quite what he meant but perfectly appropriate. Alex wants to say that everything will be explained, but it is not in this book. It is, however, illuminated, lit, revealed, opened for our own discovery. Foer (the author) allows his characters to reveal themselves to us, allows his story to unfold in a way that doesn’t provide all of the answers, but instead gives us an opportunity to see, which is so much more satisfying.
Experiment well done.
John Rigney teaches at Kenmore West High School.
He and his wife, Dana, own The Second Reader Bookshop on Hertel Avenue.
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