Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel shows signs of First-Novel disease: it presents an imaginary version of the author’s family history, it features the author himself as a character, it betrays the influence of magic realism, which young people still think is cool but which the rest of us have mostly had up to here, it suffers from uncertainty of tone and it goes for a sentimentally tragic conclusion.

On the other hand, it carries a recommendation by Joyce Carol Oates on the cover. From Oates’s description (“A zestfully imagined novel of wonders . . . He will win your admiration, and he will break your heart”), an awkward customer can deduce the youthful failings of whimsy and emotionalism, but it remains the case that Foer writes with flair.

In alternating chapters, he recounts a 1997 visit to his ancestral Jewish village in the Ukraine, and episodes from the lives of his probably made-up great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Brod, and his perhaps only partly made-up grandfather, Safran.

Brod is of interest because, as a newborn baby, she was found inexplicably floating in the river. The “Well-Respected Rabbi”, as opposed to the “Garden-Variety Rabbi”, decided that she should be brought up by Yankel, the struck-off moneylender; we are never told how Yankel lost his licence.

Safran has two claims to distinction. His withered arm for some reason made him irresistible to women, helping him on his way to a grand total of 132 mistresses, and he was one of the very few to escape when the village was ethnically cleansed by the Germans in 1942. The war wrecked his health, but he did live just long enough to reach America and to start a family afterwards.

The author does not relate the 1997 story in his own persona, adopting instead that of his hired Ukrainian translator, Alex, a 20- year-old like himself. Alex’s English is rather quaint. “I have handsome hairs, which are split in the middle.” He says that a thing is “rigid” to do, rather than “hard”, and at first he uses “flaccid” for “easy”: “An American in Ukraine is so flaccid to recognise.”

To offset this extended funny-foreigner joke, the author appears, through Alex’s eyes, as something of a funny foreigner, too. Up to a point, he is your typical whiny, picky American abroad. His vegetarianism makes life very difficult for Ukrainian waitresses, and his dog phobia is a problem for easily embarrassed Alex. Alex’s grandfather, the founder of Heritage Touring, has to drive the firm’s beaten-up old car because Alex has no licence.

Grandfather thinks he is going blind and insists on having his “deranged” guide dog in the car just in case.

Alex says that “humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story”, but the author disagrees: “I used to think that humour was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is . . . But now I think it’s the opposite. Humour is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.”

Accordingly, the wonky English, the comedy dog and the bizarre village folklore (such as the sawmill accident that left Brod’s husband not only with a circular saw stuck cockscomb-like in his head but also with a wildly erratic temper) recede a little as the novel moves to its grim finale. Foer manages this shift by being quite blatant about the artificiality of fiction. “We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes?” Alex writes, felicitously.

It is a very old trick and it doesn’t quite work here. Nice try, though.

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED by Jonathan Safran Foer (H Hamilton £14.99 pp276)

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