Mills essentially throws out the second half of the book, which kills the joke of Justin’s serial obsessions-the joke that holds the whole thing together.

Justin ends up finding religion and heading off to New York to proselytize-with his thumb still in his mouth. He leaps from obsession to obsession to replace it (and her): a leftist cutie his own age alcohol and pot Ritalin and the debate team and even fly-fishing with his overpoweringly insensitive dad (who is always stopping the car to pick up dead animal carcasses to use as bait). The book is about a suburban kid named Justin who’s madly in love with his sexy mom and can’t get his thumb out of his mouth. What he might have made of Jonathan Safran Foer … Kaufman proved in Adaptation that he could tell a story about storytelling and in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that he could do it with heart. It would have been a perfect springboard for Charlie Kaufman, who wasted his meta-narrative contortions on the much less fertile The Orchid Thief. The power of Foer’s novel is less in its incidents than in its author’s struggle to get it all down. When the eponymous illumination comes and a secret is revealed-and, by the way, it’s a radically different secret than the novel’s-it’s horrific but confusing, and surprisingly banal.Įverything Is Illuminated is not a fiasco, but in some ways I’d have preferred a fiasco-something overreaching and inchoate instead of this self-consciously artistic mood piece.

But Schreiber isn’t able to inject these ideas into our bloodstream, so the movie remains abstract and rather closed. What a payoff this might have been, even with the movie’s reduced scope! The motif of collection gestures toward so many of the great themes: the elusiveness of memory and, thus, history (see Kundera, Milan) the necessity of storytelling-of sifting through and distilling and bringing the imagination to bear on one’s past.

Everything is illuminated book review