Jacob's Folly

The main character of author and filmmaker Miller's (Personal Velocity; The Private Lives of Pippa Lee) imaginative new novel is an 18th-century Jewish peddler reincarnated as a fly on contemporary Long Island, NY. At first devastated to discover that he is not an angel, as he first presumed, Jacob Cerf nonetheless exerts a mysterious influence on two individuals: Leslie Senzatimore, a saintly boat remodeler, and Masha, a young Orthodox Jewish woman. Jacob feels compelled to pull Masha away from her religion and to knock Leslie off his do-gooder pedestal. The book juggles the stories of Masha and Leslie, who eventually meet, along with Jacob's travails from a few hundred years earlier. All three stories fascinate, especially the rules of ultra-Orthodoxy, which provide both comfort and restriction. The early part of the novel offers dazzling insights into life from a fly's perspective, though disappointingly that aspect of the book quickly dissipates. The lives of the main characters depict the complexity of exploration in faith and free will that makes for a deeply involving story.