Guile by the mile  A sly take on the Holocaust pays off, says
Mark Lawson  Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
276pp, Hamish Hamilton, £14.99  Perhaps because they saw Bambi
at an impressionable age, those in the generation of American
artists born since the late 1960s are marked by a terror of
sentimentality. Independent movies from the US - Paul Thomas
Anderson's Magnolia , Todd Solondz's Happiness, Wes Anderson's
The Royal Tenenbaums - approach terrible events with a cool,
jokey tone and ironic viewpoints.  In books, Jeffrey Eugenides's
The Virgin Suicides treats a quintet of child deaths in one
family as social comedy. Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work Of
Staggering Genius, which deals with the loss of both the
author's parents from cancer and his subsequent guardianship of
a young brother, tells of tragedy with the voice of a stand-up
comic and the graphic flourishes of a cartoonist.  So the work
which has made its 24-year-old author the new star of Manhattan
letters - vast advance, glossy