Jacob's Folly
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Jacob is a Jewish peddler living in eighteenth-century France; Leslie and Deirdre Senzatimore are a settled American couple; and Masha is an alluring, young, ultra-Orthodox Jew who is gravely ill. In Jacob’s Folly, these four individuals will find their fates intertwined and the courses of their lives irrevocably altered when Jacob is reincarnated as a housefly in contemporary Long Island.
Through the unique lens of Jacob’s consciousness, Miller explores transformation in all its different guises—personal, spiritual and literal. As she considers the hold of the past on the present, the power of private hopes and dreams, and the collision of fate and free will, Miller’s world—which is our own, transfigured by her startlingly clear gaze and by her sharp, surprising wit—comes to vibrant life. Leslie’s desire to act as hero and rescuer; Jacob’s disastrous marriage to the childlike Hodle, and his intense obsession with Masha—Miller sketches her characters’ interior lives with compassion, subtlety and an exceptionally light touch. Jacob’s Folly is wildly inventive, and ultimately moving; it will leave the reader, no less than its characters, transformed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Suspending disbelief is the biggest challenge of Miller's audacious new novel, not least because the Jacob of the title is a Jewish peddler from late 18th-century Paris who has been reincarnated on Long Island in the 21st as a fly. Jacob the fly becomes a kind of demon to a melancholy volunteer firefighter named Leslie and a lovely but conflicted Jewish actress named Masha. When Jacob realizes he can discern their dreams and influence their actions he determines to change their fates. The narrative buzzes back and forth through time, chronicling Jacob's shedding of his Jewish identity to become valet to the comte de Villars and, in time, an actor in the Com die-Fran aise, while keeping the reader abreast of the unraveling lives of Leslie and Masha. Scads of narrative threads are sewn together with impressive and often lovely wordplay to form a vast historical fabric of Jacob's Jewish family. Miller (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee) almost takes the to and fro trajectories too far, but she is so clever when dwelling in the mind and body of that insect that the reader is rarely exasperated. An unusual and absorbing read.
