The author takes centre stage

Looking at the titles of their first books, you might think that some American literary whizkids would be better at PR than creative writing. It hasn't been long since Dave Eggers appeared with his ever-so-slightly made-up memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Now here comes another self-consciously talented young author - this time with an ever-so-slightly factual work of fiction precociously called Everything is Illuminated. Naturally, his debut novel arrives from the US along with the obligatory reports of a huge advance, and gushing reviews comparing him to Marquez, and the Burgess of A Clockwork Orange.

Not that 24-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer isn't perfectly capable of providing his own cast of admirers. He has made himself the central character in this novel, which is partly based on a real-life trip he made to the Ukraine when he was 20, to search for a woman who apparently saved his grandfather, a Jew, from the Nazis during the Second World War. So, in the book, which reinvents what he found there in reality (not very much), we follow the adventures of one Jonathan Safran Foer, a young writer, as told by his admiring Ukrainian translator Alex, who calls Jonathan "the hero", and seems to see him as the next Hemingway.

If that sounds confusing, matters aren't helped by the small problem of Alex's command of written English, which is sketchy to say the least. "I fatigued the thesaurus you presented me," he writes to Jonathan quite early on, and it shows. Nearly everything he says comes out in a hilariously garbled way. "You were perhaps accounting upon a translator with more faculties, but I am certain that I did a mediocre job," he boasts. As the story goes on, his English does improve a little, although his linguistic blunders are so consistently entertaining that you don't particularly want it to.

Alex's ludicrous narration about his wayward journey through the Ukraine with Jonathan Safran Foer is alternated with excerpts from a novel that this fictional JSF is in the process of writing, which is a much more earnest, much less enjoyable piece of work. It's an imagined history of the Ukrainian village where his grandfather grew up, beginning in 1791, when the overturning of a cart in the river led to the village being christened with a name, Trachimbrod. These sections of Everything is Illuminated are followed by short letters from Alex to JSF about his novel. Feeling dizzy yet?

There are other complications too numerous to mention, as the plot structure shifts around uncertainly like a house permanently on the edge of collapse.

Somehow, though, if you're tempted enough to suspend incomprehension and carry on reading, things become genuinely gripping. The two central stories, one looking back from the present to the atrocities of the Holocaust, the other moving slowly forward from the birth of Trachimbrod to the present, begin to cross over about halfway through, with unexpectedly harrowing results. No one turns out to be quite who they thought they were.

"I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem," writes Alex to Jonathan at one point in this dazzlingly imaginative, original debut. You sense that Foer (the real one) feels the same way. He spins a dense web of interlocking tales, filled with ingenious structural games, experiments with form, endless bawdy jokes, and moving emotional interludes.

There's easily enough material here for several different books. If there's one thing that nearly undoes this whole miraculous project, though, it's that he's almost too clever for his own good.