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Title: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: A precocious boy whose father died on 9/11 finds a key labeled "Black" and systematically tries to meet every person named "Black" in New York City as a way of coping with his loss.
Thoughts: I absolutely refuse to see this movie, with its ill-considered and manipulative advertising campaign. I had heard some good things about the book, though, so when a copy ended up in my hands, I decided to give it a try.
For the most part, I don't think it's quite as manipulative as the movie appears to be. Foer lives in New York, and his writing well captures some of the rhythms and quirks of the city. So the story feels less like exploiting tragedy and more like exploring the experiences of the people around him.
On the other hand, it's almost unbearably twee. There's the ridiculously precious child at the center of the book, who seems to be constructed almost entirely out of quirks. Yes, we get it, he's smart but traumatized. That doesn't make his insistence on veganism and wearing only white clothing and shaking a tambourine all the time less annoying. There's also his grandfather, who has ridiculously and mysteriously lost his ability to speak and so communicates only by writing, and his grandmother, who may be going blind. They have a severely dysfunctional relationship.
The gaping hole is the missing father. We learn relatively little about him, but I find myself wondering if he was a vaguely normal person, like the mother, or a pretentiously literary assortment of cutsey tics like the three narrators.
In an attempt to be profound, Foer resorts to a series of typographical stunts. Blank pages, pages containing only one sentence, photos that may or may not directly relate to the story, one chapter in which words and phrases are circled in red ink, a couple pages where the letters have been replaced by the corresponding numbers from a touch tone phone, one set of three pages in which the spaces between the letters gradually disappears until the letters are all on top of each other for about two full pages of unreadable black. I suppose they did create an emotional effect, but for the most part, that emotion was annoyance.
The three voices are remarkably similar. Oh, they each have a distinctive punctuation style. (There's precious child's wordy run-ons, grandma's short sentances with too many periods, and grandpa's endless commas. Also, random old dude who ends every sentance with an exclamation point, in case exclamation points felt left out. Fortunately, no one speaks entirely in questions.) But they all use the same faux-naive overly simplistic sentence construction, with random factoids thrown in in an attempt to mimic a precocious child's short attention span. Despite the fact that these are three very different people speaking in first person, and despite the fact that the author is throwing in every literary pyrotechnic effect he can think of, the writing is fundamentally the same style for each.
I found the story interesting (although the explanation is a thematically appropriate cop-out). The ending is horribly, horribly manipulative, but I must confess, completely effective. I ended the book in the emotional state Foer was trying to achieve, so I'll hand him that. Afterwards, though, I think I was more annoyed than anything else. Because the overall style felt so artificially self-conscious and precious, I could not help but feel that he handed over his right to the extremely delicate subject matter. If I had not spent the entire book being irritated at the artsy black and white photos and the cheap typographic tricks, then perhaps the photo collage at the end would not have felt so much like the author profiting from a specific, real person's death. It might have been touching and cathartic, as intended, instead of vaguely revolting in retrospect.
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: A precocious boy whose father died on 9/11 finds a key labeled "Black" and systematically tries to meet every person named "Black" in New York City as a way of coping with his loss.
Thoughts: I absolutely refuse to see this movie, with its ill-considered and manipulative advertising campaign. I had heard some good things about the book, though, so when a copy ended up in my hands, I decided to give it a try.
For the most part, I don't think it's quite as manipulative as the movie appears to be. Foer lives in New York, and his writing well captures some of the rhythms and quirks of the city. So the story feels less like exploiting tragedy and more like exploring the experiences of the people around him.
On the other hand, it's almost unbearably twee. There's the ridiculously precious child at the center of the book, who seems to be constructed almost entirely out of quirks. Yes, we get it, he's smart but traumatized. That doesn't make his insistence on veganism and wearing only white clothing and shaking a tambourine all the time less annoying. There's also his grandfather, who has ridiculously and mysteriously lost his ability to speak and so communicates only by writing, and his grandmother, who may be going blind. They have a severely dysfunctional relationship.
The gaping hole is the missing father. We learn relatively little about him, but I find myself wondering if he was a vaguely normal person, like the mother, or a pretentiously literary assortment of cutsey tics like the three narrators.
In an attempt to be profound, Foer resorts to a series of typographical stunts. Blank pages, pages containing only one sentence, photos that may or may not directly relate to the story, one chapter in which words and phrases are circled in red ink, a couple pages where the letters have been replaced by the corresponding numbers from a touch tone phone, one set of three pages in which the spaces between the letters gradually disappears until the letters are all on top of each other for about two full pages of unreadable black. I suppose they did create an emotional effect, but for the most part, that emotion was annoyance.
The three voices are remarkably similar. Oh, they each have a distinctive punctuation style. (There's precious child's wordy run-ons, grandma's short sentances with too many periods, and grandpa's endless commas. Also, random old dude who ends every sentance with an exclamation point, in case exclamation points felt left out. Fortunately, no one speaks entirely in questions.) But they all use the same faux-naive overly simplistic sentence construction, with random factoids thrown in in an attempt to mimic a precocious child's short attention span. Despite the fact that these are three very different people speaking in first person, and despite the fact that the author is throwing in every literary pyrotechnic effect he can think of, the writing is fundamentally the same style for each.
I found the story interesting (although the explanation is a thematically appropriate cop-out). The ending is horribly, horribly manipulative, but I must confess, completely effective. I ended the book in the emotional state Foer was trying to achieve, so I'll hand him that. Afterwards, though, I think I was more annoyed than anything else. Because the overall style felt so artificially self-conscious and precious, I could not help but feel that he handed over his right to the extremely delicate subject matter. If I had not spent the entire book being irritated at the artsy black and white photos and the cheap typographic tricks, then perhaps the photo collage at the end would not have felt so much like the author profiting from a specific, real person's death. It might have been touching and cathartic, as intended, instead of vaguely revolting in retrospect.
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-28 02:45 pm (UTC)From:And wow this sounds like something I would hate. Also something that will never be made into an ebook.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-28 08:49 pm (UTC)From: