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Writers have always chronicled the pulse of the world, recorded history, made history, and changed the way we understand ourselves. Page by Page with host Jonathan Bastian is APR's weekly show devoted to the expansive breadth of books. With a strong emphasis on the literary arts, Page by Page connects with authors on a local and national level, discussing books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, history and many other pertinent subjects. In addition to weekly interviews with writers, Page by Page features literary essays, book reviews, book news, and readings.

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Alright, Jonathan Safran Foer, I Give In: The Importance of ‘Everything is Illuminated’

The colossal success of  “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer was a scarring slap in the face to us young aspiring novelists.

Foer was 25 years old when the book was published.

We put our pens down. We shut our laptops. We went for long walks, alone, in the dark, on freezing cold nights, reconsidering the trajectory of our lives and why we toiled with characters and prose. Few of us had ever experienced such devastating jealousy.

In fact, most of us never even read the book. But we had glanced at the blurbs on the dust jacket, which shouted something like: “brilliant,” “more brilliant,” “incredibly brilliant,” “nothing will ever be the same.”

This is exactly why most of never even leafed through “Everything is Illuminated.” We were frightened that the work was, in fact, so prodigious that it would expose our shrivelly, puny talents, and send us looking for a job in the advertising sector. And besides, those reviews were supposed to be for us! We were supposed to be the 25-year-old wunderkind receiving rave reviews with scalpel-sharp debut novels!

But apparently it was not to be. So we boycotted the book, coming up with alternate, specious reasons as to why we didn’t read it, like, “Sorry, it’s too mainstream” or “Why would I buy a book that they sell at the airport?”

With silly self-defensive riffs like these, we carried on with our work. I, however, gave my fiction a rest and ended up as the pugnacious critic spilling lazy words over these ragged pages. I convinced myself that I was no longer competing with Mr. Safran Foer, stowed my novelistic ego in a closet, and finally picked up “Everything is Illuminated.”

So let’s get the obvious out of the way first: Yes, it’s damn good. I’m glad I read it, finally.

The more interesting question, for me, is what this book will come to represent in the recent history of contemporary fiction.

A little background on the book: It’s about a character (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) traveling to Ukraine to search for a woman who saved his grandfather’s life during the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews. The narration switches between Foer’s and his college-aged Ukrainian tour guide, Alexander, who speaks a broken, Eastern European-influenced English.

Even from this short description we get these sort of frying-pan-in-the-face-like literary signals that Foer is up to something different. First, we have a character named after the author. Second, we have a narrator who doesn’t speak fluent English.

I’m more interested in the second of these. The comedy of this book is listening to Alexander talk. He mishmashes English words and phrases, which make sense, but not really. For example, when asking someone if they were able to sleep, he would say, “Were you able to manufacture any Zs?” Or when asking if somebody had sex, he would say, “Did you get carnal with her?” The character sounds a bit like Borat, the Ali G character.

But here’s the bigger point: Since this book, we’ve been inundated with books that feature narrators and characters that aren’t totally fluent in English, or, who speak with a heavily accented English.

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz is a major example of this. In this novel, we heard a Dominican Republic-influenced English, which was also untested and hilarious. Or, you could think of the writer Edwidge Danticat, whose writing is influenced by Haitian dialects. Then, there is Jhumpa Lahiri, whose stories incorporate Indians speaking their own brand of English.

Perhaps the most telling similarity that these authors share is that they are bestselling authors. In other words, the plurality of English dialects they are casting upon us are being received with open arms.

And why is this the case? Well, we definitely know that readers are becoming more and more diverse. Though I’m not an expert in immigration or linguistics, it seems that we reached a point where the children of many immigrants in this county are now completely fluent in English, and many of them are writing books — Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, etc. At the same time, they are writing about their culture and are using the kind of language that they might have heard at home, which is probably a mixture of English and their native language.

Whether Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything is Illuminated” will be remembered as a primary catalyst of this moment or not, I think we can say with confidence that it is definitely a pillar within it. What’s more, it’s nice letting that novelistic ego deflate for a while, and welcoming those books into our lives that are ultimately more important than our delicate literary identities.

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Photo by Jim Paussa