A novel in 300 words

Everything Is Good is a comic philosophical novel. It follows Joe, a young Jewish American traveler, as he enters Jerusalem in 1986, a city of vivid smells, textures and dangers. Joe bears an oddly damaged memory, leaving him without a coherent past. Living entirely in the present, in a city tortured by history and dangling between war and peace, Joe faces everyday violence with curiosity and compassion.

Joe argues with God, fights with rabbis, stumbles through blackouts, starves in the winter. He’s stalked by an overbearing golem-like guardian. He’s adopted by a trio of anarchist saints, dedicated to enlightening Jerusalem through outrage and insults. Joe finds himself falling reluctantly in love with Tasha, a brilliant and troubled expat. A complicated friendship develops with Harry Griffin, an elderly professor who’s hired Joe as a house-cleaner. When Harry leaves an all-but-impossible last request, Joe inherits a spiritual gift wrapped in a moral disaster.

Joe’s friend Mitka struggles to escape his father Yitzhak Yitzhak, a buffoonish New Age celebrity. Joe has unfinished business with his own father, a half-mythical traveling charlatan. Joe’s teenage protégé, the skeptical Fernando, falls under the influence of Rabbi Heitor, a brawler who wants to remake Fernando as a religious zealot. All these troubling father-figures stand as images of the patriarchal Jewish God—demanding, violent and unreachable. But if Harry is right, the old God can still be found through a sharp question and ironic humor.

Everything Is Good grapples with the sacred and absurd nature of laughter in a city torn by ancient conflicts and paradoxes. Is laughter the lightning flash of the infinite that binds all nations together? Or is it the sign of the infinitely indifferent fate that, sooner or later, will come to annihilate us all?