Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer

My, what a clever novel!

In any case, that, I imagine, is what Jonathan Safran Foer kept saying as he was writing this. And really, much about it is clever. The comparisons to A Clockwork Orange are completely unwarranted, as Alex, Foer's Ukrainian hero, destroys the English language in a quite different way than does Burgess' Alex. (A less politically correct but more conceptually accurate comparison would be Charlie Chan, as written by Earl Derr Biggers.) Foer's intertwining of stories is also quite clever, and his use of the two narrators to tell the main storylines.

However, with all the cleverness going on, Foer seems to have forgotten in many places to actually insert a novel. Threads pick up in odd places and then die with no fanfare, never to be resurrected again; the story has holes without being told an enough of an impressionist way to allow the reader to fill in enough blanks; the characters are obviously there as vehicles to carry off the cleverness, instead of being fully- realized human beings. In other words, this is a linguistic roller coaster, not a novel.

Not to say Foer doesn't write well when he forgets about the tricks and applies himself. Especially in the novel's last eighty pages, there are scenes of great beauty and tragedy that are conveyed in powerful manner that make the reader sit up and take notice. (The emotionl impact of every last one of them is dramatically undercut by Foer's following each with a needlessly scatological and/or pornographic piece of attempted humor, each of which fails because of its positioning, but the tragic pieces themselves are extremely well-written.) Unfortunately, these scenes are all too few. One of them is going along swimmingly until he decides to interject a Rick Moody-esque three-page unpunctuated sentence. Horrid. (And a trick he repeats a couple of times afterwards, also throwing in run-on words. Even more horrid.)

The book is billed as a comedy, and Foer tries to carry it off as such, but when the finest-written scenes are those of tragedy, it's hard to call it a success as attempted. Foer has the makings of a fine dramatic writer, once he gets away from being so consciously clever.