Keret refers to the ambiguous end of the story as an example of the difficulties of love: “It’s beautiful and it’s lovely, but on the other hand, those people are hanging from their skin. It’s beautiful and horrible at the same time.”

The cover of his new collection of 21 short stories and a novella illustrates this philosophy graphically. A cartoon man with an enormous smiley face shoots himself with a handgun in the left temple as blood emerges from the right. It’s a startling visual collision of “Don’t Worry Be Happy” meets Columbine. Add in the collection’s novella about an afterlife for those who commit suicide, cheerfully entitled “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” and it seems fair to ask if Keret’s public should be worried about his obsession with suicide.

“I think the question whether or not to commit suicide is a good question,” he says. “And for me the good answer is not to commit suicide and to lead a life worth living.” But the graphic on his book still stands as a more-than-adequate metaphor for his life. “Things are not either ‘this is great’ or ‘I should commit suicide,’ they’re either boring or a bit of both. They’re great and you want to commit suicide at the same time.”

* * *

Etgar Keret is an unlikely suspect for cultural icon.

Arriving nine minutes early for the interview, with some sort of green food particle stuck between his right central and lateral incisors, Keret explains that he didn’t want to meet in Lowell dining hall because of the bad memories it would evoke of his days in the military mess halls. He removes his puffy green jacket (having been acclimated to American winters from his residency at the prestigious University of Iowa International Writing Program), revealing a red long-john shirt underneath another made of flannel. The sideburns dangling from his mop of unkempt hair show the faintest wisps of gray.

And when Keret opens his mouth, it’s difficult to do anything but listen to him. Speaking in English, he has a slight stutter, an inability to pronounce the “th” sound and the gift of capturing a certain mood in millennial Western society where a person is more likely to be lonely than not, in love with love than with a person and feel adrift rather than anchored.

He was born in Ramat Gan in 1967—the year of a major Middle East war in which Israel conquered and occupied the Palestinian territories—to two Holocaust survivors who instilled in him and his two siblings “ambition, but not for anything in particular.” The result is that Keret has an ultra-orthodox sister who lives in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim with nine children and a brother who is the head of Israel’s marijuana legalization movement.

After the army, Keret began to work for a construction company to pay for his tuition at Tel Aviv University where he studied mathematics and philosophy. But the course of his life had already been predicted by the first story he ever wrote, a surrealistically autobiographical story composed five floors below ground entitled “Pipes.”

In “Pipes,” a high school graduate working in a pipe factory discovers that if he bends a pipe in a specific manner, marbles will roll into it and then disappear. The protagonist—one of the many characters in Keret’s stories who feel like an outsider and simply want to disappear—makes a giant pipe in the same shape, climbs inside, and ends up in heaven, which he describes as “simply a place for people who were genuinely unable to be happy on earth.”

“‘Pipes’ was really a story about me being very, very unhappy and knowingthat I have to find a way to another place to survive, and that other place, I think, is the stories.” Keret adds: “Because my pipes are definitely the stories.”

Within his stories, Keret lavishes affection on his characters as if they were newborn children. “I really love my characters—all my characters—and it’s difficult for me when people say, ‘I really like the story about this asshole,’ and they think that I think he’s an asshole, too. But I don’t, I really like him.”

Keret believes that the source of the confusion is his un-American use of irony: “I use irony to actually create empathy, but in America I find people who see the irony as more hateful. In the States, people read the irony of my stories as patronizing and disrespectful for the object of the irony.”

His use of irony is often laugh-out-loud funny, which led Keret to a successful stint as a comedy writer for an Israeli comedy show resembling “Saturday Night Live.” He arrived there from a failed attempt reporting at a television news-magazine show.