Foer

[Tore Rye Andersen]

From: Otto <ottosell@[omitted]>
To: pynchon-l@[omitted]
Subject: Re: The Empty Page Project


>I have to admit that I like the idea.

>Never read anything of Foer -- any recommendations?

>Otto

Yes, I have a hearty recommendation for you: Stay away from Foer at all 
costs!!

His novels are nothing but cloying schmaltz, especially 'Extremely Loud and 
Incredibly Close', and the typographical gambols in that novel really are 
cheap gimmicks. ELaIC more or less reads like Paul Auster for children, 
complete with cute illustrations, a standard quest motif and pearls of 
wisdom of the kind you normally expect to find in the little square books 
next to the cash register in book stores ("It's better to lose something 
than never to've had anything"; "You can't protect yourself from sorrow 
without also protecting yourself from joy"; "To try is not to be", etc. etc. 
(cited from memory)).
My suspicion is that Foer is exactly as naive as the child narrator Oscar in 
ELaIC, and that he more or less hides behind his narrator because he himself 
has nothing more insightful to say about 9/11. (Of course you can't expect 
profound wisdom from a child narrator, but the sections of the novel where 
Oscar's grandparents get to speak are exactly as cloying and naive as 
Oscar's sections). Granted, ELaIC doesn't purport to provide any deep 
insights into 9/11: It is first and foremost a book about individual loss 
and sorrow (the boy Oscar loses his father on 9/11), but in the light of 
this one wonders why Foer uses 9/11 (and Dresden and Hiroshima) as the 
historical backdrop for his story: He could just as easily have killed 
Oscar's father in a car crash or a random shooting and have gotten the same 
simple points across.
Oscar most of all resembles those annoying, bright kids from 80'es sitcoms: 
the ones who always wore butterflies and calculators and who could defuse 
any potential conflict with a cute remark, after which the family gathered 
around the kitchen table would laugh heartily, and the credits would start 
rolling. He comes across as a shallow construction of paper and ink - a 
two-dimensional mouthpiece for Foer's one-dimensional thoughts about loss. 
The success of Foer's novel really depends on whether we feel empathy for 
little Oscar, but to me he seems so artificial and so unconvincing that he 
left me utterly cold - or rather: utterly annoyed.

Yeah, well, sorry if I seem to be frothing a bit at the mouth here, but 
Foer's novels really annoy me.
So, IMHO, do yourself a favor and give Foer's novels a wide berth.