Jacob's Folly - by Rebecca Miller (Paperback)

About the Book

An 18th-century Jewish peddler is reincarnated as a fly in present-day Long Island, and becomes involved in the lives of two residents.

Book Synopsis

In Rebecca Miller's dazzling and inventive new novel, we meet characters separated by time but united in their desire to live a life of their own choosing, free from the constraints of community and tradition.

In eighteenth-century Paris, Jacob Cerf is a Jewish street peddler burdened by a disastrous young marriage but determined to raise himself up by whatever means he can. His richly observed life in Paris' Jewish ghetto is radically altered when he gains entrance to the opulent world of the aristocracy and the freedom to create his own identity. More than two hundred years later, Jacob reappears in surprising form in the suburbs of Long Island. He soon becomes obsessed by a young Orthodox Jewish woman with a secret ambition. Determined to change her fate, Jacob takes it upon himself to entangle her with a conflicted volunteer fireman. As Jacob's mischievous plans unfold, the burdens of duty and the pull of desire will twist the lives of all three.

Rebecca Miller explores the hold of the past on the present, the power of private hopes and dreams, the collision of fate and free will, and change in all of its various guises. Transfiguring her world with a clear gaze and sharp, surprising wit, she brings Jacob's Folly vividly to life.

Review Quotes

"Droll, racy, and occasionally cutting...this is an imaginative leap in new direction, yolking historical fiction to a contemporary drama....Delightful." --Los Angeles Times

"Miller has the soaring eye of the epicist and the sly instinct of the satirist." --The New Yorker

"Bravura storytelling...Fantastic." --The New York Times Book Review

"A feat of extraordinary imagination...Sexy [and] unapologetically lyrical." --VanityFair.com

"An ingenious, meticulously observed, profoundly absorbing, and deeply satisfying read." --USA Today

"Marvelous, deep, rich, sexy, transgressive, terrifying, tough, and very, very funny--a great ingathering as multifaceted as a gem, or the eye of a fly!" --Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Angels in America

"A hugely ambitious, wildly imaginative novel by Miller...about a dead 18th-century French Jew brought back to life as a fly in 21st-century America.

"A challenging read, yet remarkably entertaining and ultimately gripping." --Kirkus (starred)

"Readers will chuckle contentedly and without malice at a violent, life-affirming death. A deeply pleasurable, darkly comic, and original reinterpretation of Jewish history's 'indestructible storyline, ' alighting thoughtfully on forces both individual and collective, internal and external, from genocide to assimilation." --Cynthia-Marie O'Brien, Booklist (starred)

"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...is so clever when dwelling in the mind and body of that insect that the reader is rarely exasperated. An unusual and absorbing read." --Publishers Weekly

"Miller is a luminous writer and the visual impact of her sentences carry something of the cool impersonality of an Edward Hopper painting." --The Observer on The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

About the Author

Rebecca Miller is the author of the short-story collection Personal Velocity, her feature-film adaptation of which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, which she also adapted for the screen. Her other films include Angela and The Ballad of Jack and Rose. She lives in New York and Ireland with her family.