Love and its antecedents

I'm going to have to grapple with some of the plotting in this book to provide anything near an illuminating review. This means I'm going to have to spill a few of its secrets, for which I apologize. Book reviewing is a tight-rope walk. People expect the reviewer to furnish them with the tone and theme of the novel without telling them anything they haven't read yet. It's a challenge with diminishing returns.

I just called attention to the craft of writing there, a little too self-aware, and for that I am also sorry. It's also illustrative. It's a prime technique used by Jonathan Safran Foer throughout "Everything is Illuminated." He himself is a character in the novel, a Ukrainian translator is another character. This Ukrainian, who goes by the name of Alex, acts as a sounding board for the novel Foer is in the process of writing. He offers insights and criticisms. But as we'll see, it's a framing device that outlives its welcome, and broadcasts a painful truth of this beautiful, moving and ultimately flawed work: it's most definitely a debut, and was most definitely written by someone still in college, someone afraid to write without tricks.

I guess I should get my major gripes out of the way now, so I can skew positive further down (as this novel does). The framing is way too cutesy. It jumps between letters from Alex to Jonathan, commenting on the novel and filling in scenes we'll know with more heartbreak later. It also includes sections on an imaginary past in a Jewish shtetl called Trachimbrod (the strongest sections of the whole book); and sections which Alex has written in mistranslated, overzealous English about Jonathan's journey to the Ukraine to try and find a mysterious woman named Augustine who might or might not have saved Jonathan's grandfather from the Holocaust. While each section takes pains to showcase its own voice, after the initial thrill of discovery wears off the framework smells of first-draft-itis. Someone with a little more experience could have melded the sections together in more cohesive form. It feels like three novels competing for space with each other, which are finally only forged together by immense suffering from war.

Yes, this is a novel in which World World II and stormtrooping Nazis haunt the lives of the characters, in each their own way. In truth, and this is sad to say, it's hard to find any new outrage, any new shock, in the behavior of WWII Nazis bent on genocide. We've been horrified, disgusted, and ultimately dulled through plenty of accounts about their actions, their murderous contempt, their anti-Semitism taken to indefensible, anti-human extremes. To his advantage, Foer doesn't try to compete with those accounts. He gives us three scenes in and around Trachimbrod -- one a bombing, two others a town lineup where citizens are forced to point fingers identifying the Jews among their midst or be shot in the head -- that are much more affecting and painful to read than a laundry list of horrors committed at death camps could ever be. With the shock of a brutality that is almost casual in its execution, these violent scenes threaten to tear the novel to pieces with their power, but Foer frontloads (and backloads) the novel with enough instances of love and beauty that what you'll take away is not the atrocities, as much as the eyes-open wonder of Trachimbrod in its prime, and the haunting finality with which it is erased. This books tells us that Nazis hated Jews, and therefore, Nazis hated love -- and without love there is only waste.

I can understand why Foer felt his book needed loads of humor and whimsy to offset the horrors of war (he creates similar alchemy with his new novel, Extremely Fast & Incredibly Close, which deals with the attacks-by-plane of the World Trade Center). But there are sections where you can see him sweat. A case in point: Jonathan has employed Alex's grandfather to drive him through the Ukraine in search of Augustine, and for some reason, though he is the driver, this grandfather is convinced he is blind. What is already straining credibility becomes a nudge in the ribs with the addition of the man's seeing eye dog, Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. The dog provides easy laughs with its smelly backseat farts, its deranged but playful behavior, and its name. But the dog becomes a distraction from the meat of the quest, which evolves into a search not for Augustine, but for Alex's grandfather to reconcile his hidden past, and for Alex to realize that to grow into a man he has to leave some of his dreams behind. Alex and Jonathan exchange several letters wondering whether the dog should stay in the narrative. While this acknowledges the problem of having a cutesy animal in the story, it doesn't solve it. Foer forgets the dog for long stretches of time near the end of the book, and at one point feeds it peanuts even though earlier he was warned that the dog is deathly allergic to them. Since by this point, the author has already mentally checked out from the dog's presence, the animal -- a cheap, lazy laugh -- should have been jettisoned.

My other problem with this book: Foer is an ironic sentimentalist. Irony and sentiment are two things that don't fit so well together; such a mixture often leads to bathos. You can tell that Foer believes strongly in love -- when his characters aren't fighting for it, they're living in a netherworld -- but he is afraid to give it the name of love. He goes out of his way, in the many stories of discovery, sex and joy throughout this novel, to tell the reader that this isn't really love the characters are feeling, though he never gives a logical reason why that has to be the case, nor does he provide a satisfactory substitute emotion in its stead. This must be a conviction of the novelist then. No wonder he has to pad his life with whimsy and humor, because it must get pretty lonely, scrubbing his feelings of any surface that could prove vulnerable and truly intimate.

This leeches into a further problem with Foer's outlook: love takes on gruesome, Gothic extremes when it is realized. One woman only starts loving her husband -- who becomes an emotional cripple after a saw lodges in his head -- when he is near death. Both of them are sequestered in separate rooms, and make love through a hole in the wall. While a memorable scene for its invention, it flatlines emotionally. Again and again, Foer's characters are hardly able to admit their love. A long apology and romanticized myth-making of Foer's grandfather, for example, notes that the man, who is involved with a forbidden love for close to a decade, never actually loved her, though I don't buy that for a second. Foer never answers the Why of his character's motives, while at the same time slopping love in embarrasingly huge amounts across the story. It's doomed romanticism that grists the mill here -- which is less love than narcissism -- and that sours Foer's backdrop of magic realism.

For all the novel's flaws, the magic realism is the real reason to devour this book. You're swept into a Jewish shtetl which houses a synagogue with wheels, so the community can roll it at the Rabbi's request to rest exactly on the imaginary Jewish-Human Faultline. An unexplained tragedy -- a wagon overturning in the river Brod -- leads to a yearly festival where neighboring communities congregate to ogle butterfly-decorated floats, dive into the river to search for sacks of gold, eat, drink and be merry. During this festival, lengths of white string connect the town -- a bedpost here, a minute hand there -- which triangulate over a statue of a mermaid in the town square. A series of books kept in the library attempts to house the town's secrets, dreams, and daily minutiae. In these parts of the novel, the characters and their suffering are shoved off frame, and we revel in Foer's true gift: his boundless imagination, ease at creating bittersweet fables, and stunning moments of poetry, such as bolts of lightning that travel between the shoulder blades of someone you've just made love to.

I hope that Foer becomes more honest with himself as his career progresses. In the end, for a novel about coming to grips with the past by living life for love, the book feels at a remove from its intentions. Foer wants you to cry along with his characters, laugh with them, even sleep with them -- but he doesn't want you to love them. Or, if he does want you to love them, god forbid, keep it to yourself.