BOOK NOTES

Everything is illuminated for Princeton University graduate

By: Joan Ruddiman
   For a young guy, Jonathan Safran Foer is an old hand at writing. He made a name for himself at Princeton University by winning the creative writing prize each of his four years there. His first novel began as his senior thesis.
   Mr. Foer attracted the attention of Joyce Carol Oates early in his freshman year. Her opinion that he had writing talent encouraged the teen to consider pursuing writing.
   One project resulted in his first published work — as editor of "A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell" (Distributed Art Publishers, 2001).
   Mr. Foer wrote to famous poets and writers requesting that they create original poetry and fiction inspired by the art of Joseph Cornell. Twenty notable talents — Robert Pinsky, Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Moody and Diane Ackerman, among others — are included in the anthology.
   Mr. Foer’s short stories have been published in high-powered journals — The Paris Review and The New Yorker — and he has won major awards including the Zoetrope: All Story Fiction Prize in 2000.
   It was his first novel, however, that established Mr. Foer as a major literary talent. The oddly wonderful "Everything is Illuminated: A Novel" (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002) also began at Princeton.
   In 1999, Mr. Foer went to the Ukraine to research his grandfather’s life in the ancestral shtetl. He found, literally, nothing — but he tumbled into a novel.
   In interviews, including a long conversation with Robert Birnhaum on identitytheory.com, Mr. Foer has said that he considered telling the story in a series of letters, "maybe as non-fiction" or "maybe as memoir."
   "I allowed it to grow very intuitively," as he attended to "certain responsibilities to the form," he says.
   It is not hard to find Holocaust stories in Europe, so no surprise that the search for the grandfather’s story becomes a tale of Nazi brutality.
   However, telling these stories is harder to do. Mr. Foer — two generations removed from the horrors of his grandfather’s world — maneuvers his readers’ emotions across absurdities and atrocities. The humor and the horror coexist in a story that is both surreal and too real.
   The narrator is a quirky guy named Alexander Perchov who works with his father Alexander and his grandfather Alexander in the family business.
   "Father toils for a travel agency, denominated Heritage Touring. It is for Jewish people, like the hero, who have cravings to leave that ennobled country America and visit humble towns in Poland and Ukraine" as these pilgrims "try to unearth places where their families once existed."
   Alex thinks it’s just stupid that people would pay his father "very much currency in order to take vacations FROM America TO Ukraine." Alex, as is obvious, is a delightful modern "Mr." Malaprop.
   He "spleens" his mother by "disseminating so much currency" in part by "being carnal" with so many girls. But he says the women love him because he is "a very premium person."
   Alex serves as the foil to "the hero of this story" — Jonathan Safran Foer, who travels to the Ukraine to find the woman who may have saved his grandfather during the war.
   That’s two parts of the whole. Mr. Foer the author also creates an outlandish history of the shtetl Trachimbrod going back several hundred years that endears its innocent citizens to the reader.
   Then the Nazis and reality arrive. The old and young Alexander/Alex, with Jonathan, find more than what they anticipated.
   In interviews, Mr. Foer mentions in passing his philosophy major at Princeton. Joshua Wolf Shenck, in an interview posted for Mother Jones, notes that Mr. Foer drafted his novel as his senior thesis. What is not as well known is that not only were the beginnings of "Everything is Illuminated" honored with the creative writing prize, but that Mr. Foer also won the philosophy prize in his senior year for the work.
   Truth to myth and back again to truth, the game of names, friendship and love on all levels are just some of the philosophical themes Mr. Foer manages with great skill in his novel. The prize seems fitting.
   For those who enjoy novel/film tie-ins, "Everything is Illuminated" also became a movie, directed by Liev Schreiber and starring Elijah Wood. Released in 2005 with a limited run, it did receive favorable comments.
   Mr. Foer crosses other artistic venues with his work, including art and music.
   He has been asked about the graphic style of the novel — the wavy lines, pages of repeating phrases — what he calls "graphic tschotskes." All were in his manuscript, "expressing the story as I felt the story," and were wisely preserved by the publisher.
   Mr. Foer attributes this style, in part, to the Internet generation for whom, "the world is more a collage everyday."
   Mr. Foer’s novel "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) extends the use of visual images on the page that impact how the story is conveyed. This novel again explores intense issues and emotions, as Mr. Foer melds family members’ experiences in the Dresden firebombing with the 9/11 tragedy, as told through the precocious voice of a 9-year-old whose father dies in the tower inferno.
   Mr. Foer is married to the novelist Nicole Krauss, who has written "Man Walks Into a Room" ( Doubleday, 2002), and "The History of Love: A Novel" (W.W. Norton, 2005). Together they collaborated with Dave Eggers and the staff of McSweeney’s on "The Future Dictionary of America" (McSweeney’s, 2005) that is a compilation of mock vocabulary as suggested by over one hundred authors, including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Art Spiegelman.
   The intent of the editors and contributors was to promote progressive causes during the November 2004 election. They were joined in their efforts by many contemporary musicians who contributed exclusive works for a CD produced by Barsuk Records that was included with the book.
   Rock musicians collaborating on a dictionary isn’t such a stretch for Mr. Foer, for whom music is another medium for creative expression. Between novels, he wrote a libretto.
   Of "Everything is Illuminated" Mr. Foer says, "I was half a degree from never publishing my book … I just got a great ride. I got really lucky."
   Though "numerous agents and numerous publishers" rejected him, it was more than just luck that got his first novel published.
   Those who appreciate the talents of this young man — he’s just 30 — will be pleased to know his next novel is in the works; it’s titled "The Zelnick Museum."
Joan Ruddiman, Ed.D., is a teacher and friend of the Allentown Public Library.