Jacob's Folly by Rebecca Miller – review

Tension between the longing for community and the desire for freedom is the dynamic that powers Jacob's Folly, the second novel by Rebecca Miller (pictured), exemplified in the lives of two wayward Jews. Jacob Cerf is a young pedlar in pre-revolutionary France, schlepping a box of trinkets around town and ruing the day his parents married him off to a timorous, half-mad girl plagued by digestive problems. Masha Edelman lives in contemporary Long Island, and though she abides by her faith's dictates to dress modestly, to cover her hair with a wig in public and to avoid touching any man to whom she is not related, her elders still worry that there's something a little too alluring about her to make for the perfect orthodox Jewish wife.

Jacob openly wants to be a Frenchman and Masha secretly wants to be an actor, although her family is warm enough to make her ambivalent about leaving orthodoxy behind. In time, the stage will bewitch Jacob as well, giving him "the closest thing I have ever felt to a true metaphysical frisson". Miller, who is married to Daniel Day-Lewis and whose father was the playwright Arthur Miller, posits the theatre as an alternative form of transcendence, one that doesn't require the squelching of unruly or selfish desires. But it's also an agent of corruption and cynicism that Jacob embraces and Masha approaches with wariness.

Stay or go: which path offers the greater joy and the lesser peril? That's the question that preoccupies both Masha and Jacob in this mostly diverting novel. Miller links her two main characters together with deft, precise stitches. Both suffer from lung problems, for example, their troubled respiration paralleling their conflicted inspiration. Once Jacob and Masha wrestle their way out of the confines of their communities, the novel finds its liveliest, sharpest moments in the nutty gentiles they encounter. An aristocrat with masochistic sexual appetites takes a mysterious interest in rescuing Jacob from prison. Masha's talent attracts a once-powerful agent who blew his career on coke binges during which he "spent all night making manic, unnecessary phone calls to producers in whatever part of the world was awake, ranting on behalf of his clients who were filming in Prague or Australia, making outrageous demands just so he didn't have to go home to his empty house".

These supporting characters compensate for some of the novel's less successful elements, one of which is Leslie Senzatimore, a Long Island paterfamilias who serves nobly in the volunteer fire department and becomes guiltily infatuated with Masha. He's rather dull, alas. But Miller's most regrettable choice is the novel's hyperactive framing device: Jacob, reincarnated as a housefly with the power to read minds and travel (imaginatively, I think) through time and space, observes and narrates the behaviour and thoughts of the modern-day characters as well as delivering flashbacks of his human past.

It's never a good sign when the main thing you notice about some significant element of a novel is the structural problem it solves for the novelist, but it's worse when the problem itself is imaginary. Miller could easily have juxtaposed the stories of human-Jacob, Masha and Leslie without the supernatural narrative connective tissue provided by fly-Jacob and left her readers free to draw their own conclusions about what unites them. She does suggest that Jacob might be a "gilgul neshamot", a transmigrated Jewish soul, with a demonic mission "to derail the righteous and lead them into various temptations". In fly form, he implants wayward dreams and desires in both Masha and Leslie. This gives him something to do in the present-day sections of the narrative besides observe (as – ugh! – the proverbial fly on the wall), but it just isn't necessary to explain their bad behaviour. Humanity's native perversity is always sufficient unto the day.

Unfortunately, a lot of the first quarter of Jacob's Folly consists of setting up the fly-Jacob device: introducing his 18th-century sensibility to 21st-century America, establishing the limits of his telepathic and thought-control powers, dispensing his opinions of the various present-day characters. Except for a couple of insouciant touches about the mating rituals of flies and the delights of tasting gravy with one's feet, most of this stuff feels forced. The more Miller tries to elaborate on her conceit, the less convincing it is. How come Jacob knows enough to call a rearview mirror and steering wheel by their proper names, but refers to a car as a "horseless carriage", an elevator as "the secret room that plummeted" and cell phones as "magic shining voice boxes"? It's as if Miller felt obliged to create a character to embody that most taken for granted of all storytelling techniques: the third-person omniscient narrator. It hardly seems worth the bother, and as the novel goes on you get the impression Miller realises this.

There are fewer intrusions from fly-Jacob and Jacob's Folly clicks into gear; if you can get past the intermittent clumsiness of the first 10 chapters, it becomes a genuine pleasure to read. Miller's reasons for saddling the book with fly-Jacob's perspective become clearer at the end, but they never feel more than superfluous to the lonely wanderings of his human incarnation and Masha's quest to do justice to her gifts. These are the heart of the novel, and its redemption; they require no explanation. If only Miller had trusted enough in the story she has to tell and swatted that meddlesome bug away.