Booking It: Everything Is Illuminated

No one but Jonathan Safran Foer – who spoke at the Middlebury College Commencement in 2013 – could have written Everything Is Illuminated. Of course, this is true to a degree of any piece of writing, but one can imagine that if another author was, for example, given the outline of an Agatha Christie novel and asked to write it, the story would remain intact. Not so with Everything Is Illuminated. Foer’s unique, extraordinary style is integral to the novel at every level, clear in the plot, the characterization, the emotional investment and the terribly beautiful series of climaxes. Foer’s writing shapes them all.

It is not a comfortable novel to read. If you are new to Foer, I would recommend possibly starting with his other famous novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Although the writing in the latter is not by any means conventional, the plot and the general sense of the novel are far more straightforward. In Everything Is Illuminated, Foer never lets you rest. It stretches across time, from the crash of a wagon in a tiny unnamed town in the middle of Ukraine in 1791 to the troubled family life of a teenage boy in modern-day Odessa. The novel will jump ahead of itself, flashback, flash forward, scrounge up scraps of the past and leave you dizzy wondering what year it is, or if it even really matters. That which is comic Foer turns poignant, and that which is odd Foer makes comic, with moments of drama appearing when you least expect them. The reader careens from one emotion to the next, never entirely sure what the experience is or should be and eventually coming out the other side confused but not untouched. The semi-memoir, semi-fictional quality of the book, too, leaves one unsteady. Was it real? Was it fiction? Or both? Or perhaps it is fiction, but what is important is the greater literary truth that it expresses.

On the surface, the story does not seem all that complicated. A young American man named, coincidentally, Jonathan Safran Foer, comes to the Ukraine with an old photograph searching for the woman he believes saved his grandfather from the Nazi’s. It has the potential for a satisfying and moving tale, laced with the humor of the difficulty of finding vegetarian meals in Eastern Europe and the slightly inept translator coping with his cranky grandfather as chauffeur and the clueless American client. Foer, however, makes this story far, far more.
No sooner do you open the book than you are greeted with “An Overture to the Commencement of a Very Rigid Journey,” an introductory chapter that begins with “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.” Roughly half of the novel is told from the perspective of Alex, who is the occasionally incompetent translator mentioned above. All of his sections are similar to those first few lines. His English is awkward at best, at times downright wrong and confusing at its worst. Yet Foer’s genius shines through as he uses his narrator’s language to communicate tone and feeling in a way not possible with traditional, proper English. Alex’s stilted repetition of the translations between Ukrainians and the “hero,” Jonathan Safran Foer, conveys the confusion and awkwardness of the back-and-forth better than any description could do. His gradual loss of punctuation, paragraph breaks, and even indications of who is speaking catches the reader in the stream of action so that one is as much in the moment as the characters. Foer’s use of language transcends its normal confinements to communicate in ways we encounter when speaking in everyday life, but do not expect to find in a novel.

Alternating with Alex’s chapters are those written in Foer’s voice. In these, he does use proper grammar and vocabulary, but his style is still far from traditional. His story ranges from the mundane to the almost fantastical, from passages of farcical characterization to strange and beautiful descriptions of love and painted hands and sex and dreams and death. Through it all, the novel maintains the ability to surprise. The present and recent and distant pasts interweave in ways one does not expect, but Foer is not one to tie everything together with a neat bow. The ending does not leave everything resolved or even trace each character succinctly back to his or her roots. Instead, I think Foer captures something much more truthful, beautiful and sad about the past. There are connections where one does not expect them, and there are none where one hopes to find them. The resolutions the “hero” wanted to find are not there, but other ones are.

Everything Is Illuminated is, above everything, hard to pin down. It is difficult to know what is truth or fiction, whether to laugh or cry, what is past or present and even who the characters are. Its title is misleading. Yet it is precisely because of its ambiguity that this novel can capture you, whisk you away to Ukraine, and leave you moved by its passion and beauty.