Laughter in the Dark

At some point in the past year, people asked themselves the question, When is it O.K. to stop crying and start laughing again? Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin; 276 pages), is a very funny book about very tragic times, and it’s just a little bit nervous about being so funny. After one comic aside, the narrator — a Ukrainian would-be hipster (and remedial English student) named Alexander Perchov — feels as if he has to reassure his audience: “It was not wrong to make a funny here. It was the right thing to do.” And it was.

Everything Is Illuminated is written as a duet for two voices. One belongs to Jonathan Safran Foer (or his fictional alter ego of the same name), who relates the history of Trachimbrod, the East European village where his ancestors lived. Trachimbrod is a lyrical, fairy-tale creation, a Yiddish idyll of the Fiddler on the Roof variety, inhabited by randy, gossipy villagers like Bitzl Bitzl the gefiltefish monger, and the melancholy maiden Brod, the narrator’s great-to-the-fifth grandmother, who precociously enumerates 613 varieties of sadness by the time she’s 12 years old.

Perchov, the novel’s other, more successfully realized narrator, tells a very different tale. He acts as a translator when Foer takes a trip to Ukraine. Bluff, gruff and unflappable, he writes in broken English: “I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa.” (His English gets better — and less hilarious — as the book goes on.) Accompanied by Perchov’s narcoleptic grandfather and a flatulent dog named Sammy Davis Jr., Foer and Perchov set off into the Ukrainian countryside to search for what’s left of present-day Trachimbrod.

Alternating chapters, the two voices come at the plot from both ends at once, Foer moving forward in time through Trachimbrod’s history and Perchov searching backward for traces of it. They also share themes: the maddening bonds of family, the power of memory and the importance of lies and jokes. “I present not-truths in order to protect you,” Perchov tells his charge. “That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person.” The two stories collide when the searchers stumble on Trachimbrod’s last surviving inhabitant, who tells the horrifying secret of how the dreamy little village met its end in the nightmare of World War II.

A certified wunderkind at 25, Foer spares no expense with his typographical special effects — italics, capital letters, parentheses within parentheses, onomatopoeia, song lyrics and encyclopedia entries — and the book comes laden with bloated blurbs (“He will win your admiration, and he will break your heart,” croons Joyce Carol Oates), but don’t let that distract you. Under it all there’s a funny, moving, unsteady, deeply felt novel about the dangers of confronting the past and the redemption that comes with laughing at it, even when that seems all but impossible. As Perchov would say, it’s the right thing to do.