“Everything Is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything is Illuminated

By Jonathan Safran Foer
2002
276 pages. Audio: 11 hours and 35 minutes
Fiction

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Life can be profoundly unfair. Calvin had written his Institutes at an age when I was still in graduate school. Jonathan Safran Foer wrote his brilliant novel, Everything is Illuminated, at the ripe old age of 24 and then turned around and wrote another excellent novel three years later. It had the pithy little title of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. There is considerable debate among my friends about which of these two novels is better, and while I admire both, I choose the first.

I think the two hardest things for a writer to do are to make their writing scary and funny. That is why am always in search of the book that really scares me and the one that makes me laugh out loud. This book is laugh-out-loud, embarrass-yourself-on-an-airplane funny, and much of the humor comes from our immigrant hero’s absolute battering of the English language. The first paragraph is a small masterpiece. Allow me to quote a couple of the more memorable phrases.

I have a miniature brother who dubs me Ali. I do not like this name very much, but I dig him very much, so okay, I permit him to dub me Ali. As for his name, it is little Igor, but father dubs him Clumsy One, because he is always promenading into things. It was only four days previous that he made his eye blue from a mismanagement with a brick wall.

But the book isn’t just played for laughs. Our hero Alex is on a quest. He is off to the former Soviet Union to find out about his family. The book that begins so hilariously winds up in a way that is utterly heartbreaking.

There are some postmodern hijinks in this novel. That is, one of the characters is Jonathan Safran Foer. I want to assure the reader who is leery of this kind of thing that the novel does have a perfectly good (though complex) plot. Revelations continue to happen throughout the book.

This is also one of those books for which I should issue a strong content warning. Some of the jokes are much too dirty for this blog, and Alex has an ambitious sex life and a hilarious, fractured way of telling us about it. If you are easily offended this is not the book for you.

Ultimately, I think the book is about memory, language, and what Alex calls “common decencies.” It is also about the legacy of the Holocaust. All of us who preach know that every member of our church has a story, and they will bring their understanding of that story to bear on the story we are trying to tell.

After these two wonderful novels, Foer wrote a couple of other books—one fiction and one nonfiction that I must admit I don’t particularly care for. Serves him right, I say. But if he never writes another great book, he is already two great books ahead of me.