Jacob's Folly by Rebecca Miller, review Towards the end of Rebecca Miller's new novel, a family tree is laid out on a kitchen table. A labour of love, it has taken its compiler 10 years to complete and its revelations date back to the 17th century. A family tree, of course, compels speculation about the lives of the unknown but real people whom it identifies, and their influence upon our own lives. It also gives the impression that the individual life is part of an ordered pattern, rather than a series of accidental events begun by the triumph of one sperm over 14million others. Though Miller's characters are not real people (not all of them are even people), she threads their lives together in a way that somehow preserves the sense of order - of destiny, even - and the randomness. Given that the book is narrated by a fly (a nod, perhaps, to Kafka), it is a highly imaginative exercise that turns out to be comic, raucous and tender, sometimes all at once. The picaresque fly is based in present-day America, but in a former life he was Jacob Cerf, a Jewish pedlar in 18th-century Paris. As an insect, Jacob is bent on serious moral mischief - and has the power to achieve it. The two other characters at the heart of the novel are Masha Edelman, a young, strictly Orthodox Jewish woman, and Leslie Senzatimore, a volunteer fireman and mender of boats. Both are paragons, and Jacob the Jewish fly makes it his mission to subvert their too-good-to-be-true qualities by undoing their respective corsets of probity. He stirs the beauteous Masha's normally suppressed instinct to rebel against her rule-driven home life and awakens her dormant desire to become an actress - tantamount to blasphemy in her milieu. The rock of reliability that is Leslie is tempted by the all-seeing fly to transform from selfless to selfish. All of this is conveyed amid a rapid, cross-cutting sequence of flights across continents and centuries in which the human Jacob also seeks release in the theatrical life after escaping from a hedonistic aristocrat. The latter has his own subversive agenda and this, too, involves a compulsive unpicking of Jewish integrity - that of Jacob himself. In Jacob's Folly, Miller conjures with both the ethics of belief and the pleasures of make-believe, and remarkably manages to do so in bawdy, entertaining fashion. Jacob's Folly Rebecca Miller Canongate, £16.99, 352pp