But author-Eleanor is the true construct. She is merely a codex to decipher the heart, which is embedded two tales deep. The Eleanor that matters is the one inside the story, not the one writing it.
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The author speaks literally to you, the person reading the book. It is startling to have her stop her first-person account—the now standard casual-modern-non-fiction talk-text—and turn to the reader. She directly asks you a rhetorical question while calling you “you,” drawing attention to your own existence. She knows you’re there, knows she exists as a brief voice in your head, her own existence entirely out of her control. And then this sublime moment of flux is over as the tale moves on like it was nothing at all to upend the tacit conventions upon which the written word stands. She makes a salient socioeconomic point to facilitate a mental return back to nonfictionland; the reader can forget that they were a “you” that the author wrote something to and go back to being "the reader."
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Later, no, I would see that it was the Flatbush of New York City: a number of stories in Certain American States are set in the New York that I know and love, the New York of middling affluence, of hope and transition and internal errors, cosmetic scars that cannot dig deeply enough for permanent damage. Stories of relative hardships, of ennui unmoored from deadly consequences of aimlessness. No threat of survival within these certain American states, only danger to potential, to the lack of the stunning success that was promised, a failure to reach the "better off than your parents' generation" fealty to which we were sworn.
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The ubiquity of multi-point-of-view narration that has overtaken modern fiction fits smoothly into The Golem and the Jinni. Both characters address the same concerns—apartments, jobs, friends, society—in very different ways. The swaps of narrative perspective at the chapter breaks do what they should in a great book; the reader wants to continue with the Golem at the start of a Jinn chapter, yet at the start of a Golem chapter the recently ended Jinn chapter lingers in the mind. As the two characters’ lives become intertwined, the perspective swaps increase in both speed in frequency, sometimes occurring multiples times within the same chapter. This structural choice emphasizes their relationship in a way that rigid “one chapter, one perspective” would not, and heightens the ties that bind them together in the mind of the reader. Their separate and unique stories have fused together in a very real, physical way.
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