EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED By Jonathan Safran Foer Houghton Mifflin: 276 pp., $24

Jonathan Safran Foer, the 25-year-old author of this remarkable first novel, was the editor of an anthology of writings devoted to the American artist Joseph Cornell. The temptation to compare the brimming, tidbit-strewn and delightful “Everything Is Illuminated” with one of Cornell’s curio-filled boxes is impossible to resist: They both demand and deserve to be considered repeatedly and from varying angles; they provoke laughter as easily as they elicit curiosity; they teem with the unpredictable afterlife of artifacts; and they unabashedly show off their seams--the paper and glue, the narrative shifts and intermingling of voices--to the world.

Yet “Everything Is Illuminated” is more than an oddball objet. It’s probably the first convincing report from Generation Y (for lack of a better label) on the legacy of the Holocaust. It’s a powerful document, telling the story of Jonathan Safran Foer (the protagonist’s name is the same as the author’s) and his idealistic search, during the summer before senior year in college, for Trachimbrod, the vanished Ukrainian shtetl where his grandfather somehow escaped the Nazis.

Entwined with this search, in alternating chapters, is Jonathan’s work-in-progress, a precociously surreal novel about Trachimbrod from 1791 to the day the bombs came down in 1941.

The story of Jonathan’s sojourn to the Ukraine is told in the voice of his America-obsessed, Ukrainian Gentile translator and Sancho Panza, Alex, a fellow who, by his own account, is “always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency,” usually in “famous nightclubs.” Alex points out that “Lamborghini Countaches are excellent, and so are cappuccinos,” and that “many girls want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements, notwithstanding the Inebriated Kangaroo, the Gorky Tickle, and the Unyielding Zookeeper.” In Alex’s estimation, the American Jonathan, whom he dubs “the hero,” is one “ingenious Jew.”

As for Jonathan, his tales of Trachimbrod’s petty, venal and sexed-up eccentrics are, in some ways, as hilariously tortured as Alex’s thesaurus-fueled malapropisms. (Think “Fiddler on the Roof” meets Mel Brooks meets Breughel meets McSweeney’s.)

It’s as if Foer is lampooning the very idea of experimental fiction while executing the most appealing version of it in recent memory. As Foer goes about reminding us of the importance of remembering, he continually undermines this lesson with outrageous anachronisms and by showing that the past often looks suspiciously like the present.

Jonathan’s search for the fate of his grandfather is equally fraught with ambivalence; it exposes Jonathan’s naivete, but it also, in a stunning twist, reveals the proximity of Alex’s doddering grandfather to Jonathan’s own tragic family history.

With its multiple narrators, spiraling layers of jokes and breakneck shifts between hilarity and horror, with its Nabokovian aura of mischief-making, with its sidelong glances at post-Iron Curtain capitalism and contemporary anti-Semitism, with its wonderfully unlikely cross-cultural friendship between Jonathan and Alex and with its daringness to show that irony, in the right hands, still has the power to enlighten, “Everything Is Illuminated” is a veritable box of treasures.

*

MY LIFE IN HEAVY METAL

By Steve Almond

Grove Press: 206 pp., $23

In this slim debut collection of stories, Steve Almond chronicles the lives of men and women--teenagers, twentysomethings and thirtysomethings--as they veer between boring office jobs and stints as expatriates, using their sexual curiosity like antennae probing an alien landscape. Almond, likewise, has acute sensors when it comes to the sociological and sexual intersections of modern life. In the title story, a guy moves to El Paso after college to take a newspaper job that, much to his girlfriend’s dismay, requires him to report on--and become somewhat obsessed with--the endless series of hair bands--Skid Row, Motley Crue, Guns N’ Roses--that come through town.

In “Geek Player, Love Slayer,” a 33-year-old woman gets the hots for the improbably sexy office computer tech and poses the ponderable question, “How did Computer Guy become the Lifeguard of the decade?” And in “The Pass,” a narrator examines why pickup lines have become so passe: “the pass is what semioticians would call a lapsed signifier.”

Almond’s eye for modern types is impeccably, almost academically, sharp, and yet these stories, slight as they sometimes are, never come across as schoolwork. They’re too funny, and, like the jilted sex buddy of “The Body in Extremis,” a story that echoes Mary Gaitskill and Matthew Klam, they’re determinedly “softhearted and hopeful.”