To say the publication of 25-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer’s debut novel has been eagerly awaited is an understatement. The fictionalized travelogue of his journey to his grandfather’s vanished Ukraine shtetl was excerpted last year in the New Yorker’s Summer Fiction issue. Houghton Mifflin vied with a dozen other publishers to offer an advance said to be around $500,000. The book is set to be translated into 12 languages. It’s already been optioned for screen treatment. In a New York Times Book Review cover story, Francine Prose recalls being aloft on a transatlantic flight and repressing the pricy urge to phone friends and read them passages aloud. On the dust jacket, Dale Peck gushes that it’s " one of the best novels I’ve ever been fortunate enough to hold in my hands. "
Can a debut from someone so young possibly be this good? Or is Foer merely the latest in a string of talented but way overpraised writers who’ve been lionized more for their youth and " innovative " literary conceits than for any substantive accomplishments. ( " Foer is the perfect example of a young writer who has come from the right family, attended the right schools, interned at the right places, and made the right friends in order to succeed in Big Publishing, " carps Web ’zine My Manifesto.) The truth, as it usually does, lies somewhere between the histrionics of Peck et al. and the sniping of his nay-sayers.
No question, Foer can write, and he possesses a dazzling imagination — accomplishments made even more salient by his tender age. But are the weighty issues he explores in the novel illuminated by his unorthodox approach?
Foer’s story is about a twentysomething American Jew named Jonathan Safran Foer (Philip Roth’s old solipsistic eponymy trick), specifically his journey to Ukraine to locate the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. But Jonathan isn’t the main character here. That’s Alex, the Ukrainian gentile who, along with his gruff grandfather and a flatulent pooch named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior, accompanies " the spoiled Jew " and acts as his translator.
Alex provides the first of the book’s two distinct narratives, recounting the particulars of the trip in a broken English that’s often very funny — even if it sometimes seems Foer created his speech pattern by simply rearranging the syntax and using a thesaurus to replace every other word with its most outlandish synonym (as in " An American in Ukraine is so flaccid to recognize " ). The other strand is Jonathan’s fanciful, mytho-poetic tale, which is written in an imagistic style that often evokes Marc Chagall’s swirlingly colorful paintings of Eastern European peasantry, of life in the shtetl from the time of Jonathan’s great-great-great-great-great grandmother to the shtetl’s annihilation by the Nazis. Foer draws on a pastiche of Judaic influences — the imagery of the Old Testament, the formal conventions of the Talmud, and more prosaic preoccupations (sex, scatology) to resurrect a world that’s long dead.
These two dissimilar narrative threads are meant to complement each other. But though each can be engaging — even sublime — their juxtaposition doesn’t quite work. Neither, often, does Foer’s vacillation among light comedy (a disquisition, say, on the difference between " schmuck " and " schmendrick " ), absurd Kafkaesque moments (a man who lives with a saw blade stuck in his head), and tragedy (a graphic, horrifying climax).
The Holocaust was an all-too-real event that has seen no dearth of fictionalizations in the last half-century. So it’s doubly bold for someone Foer’s age to essay another one. Perhaps he felt he could make a claim to the subject only by creating this daring structure and hanging it with abstruse prose. His approach works in some places but seems arbitrary in others. Worse, his high-flown locutions often distract from the subtler emotions, which feel overshadowed, not illuminated, by Foer’s lexical legerdemain.
It’s hard to cavil at such an ambitious work from so young a writer. But Foer could strike a better balance between the aching humanity at the heart of his novel and the acrobatic vigor of his technique. Or as Alex might say: Jonathan Safran Foer is a prehensile writer, but he must diagnose how to reign in his conjury and tell the chronicles of his protagonists in a more personal and feeling mode.
