“It’s wonderful to think that the very young Jonathan Safran Foer...can be writing so well and with such lofty aspiration,” wrote Adam Begley of the New York Observer. “It will be wonderful if he writes many more books.”
The glowing reviews were indeed widespread, but they were always accompanied by that caveat—that Foer was a young kid yet, and that his best work was ahead of him. Most likely true—Foer himself says that he’d hate to fulfill his potential so early in life—but one might expect him to wilt at the immense pressure of unbounded expectation.
His humble demeanor at the Brattle reading reveals that he’s taking it in stride, however, thanking his lucky stars for letting him be a writer and ignoring most critics in favor of following his own admittedly ambiguous literary agenda.
BAG OF TRICKS
The agenda, for now, seems to involve some deceptively risky experiments with form, as well as a complete rejection of realism in favor of that empathy and emotion he wants so badly to convey. Foer doesn’t care what it takes to get to the reader, he says, and he doesn’t care how unrealistic his scenarios and characters end up.
In “Extremely Loud,” this appears to require photographic illustrations, whole pages of blank space, disorienting experiments with typesetting, and a flipbook of a man falling from the burning World Trade Center. Although it’s an admittedly clichéd term, “Extremely Loud” is a multimedia experience, although to Foer’s credit, it’s not an offensively kitschy one.
Beneath the frills, Foer says, lies an almost archetypal tale—one that draws less from postmodern literary theory and more from the traditional fable. Although the narrative foreground is colored and clouded over by Foer’s insistence on side-stories and his obsession with the past, it really is a pretty simple tale. Oskar searches the five boroughs of New York City for information about a mysterious key he has discovered in his father’s closet. Along the way, he makes some new friends, learns some lessons, and follows secret clues. Foer tells a fairytale that might, with some adaptation, engage Oskar’s third grade classmates.
“I had zero interest in creating something that was realistic,” Foer said in our interview. “I just wanted to create something that a reader could really invest him or herself in, something the reader could, I don’t know...trust.”
The New York Times Book Review’s Walter Kim has confused Foer’s quaint simplicity with “tritenesses” [sic]. According to Kim, the avant-garde ornamentations cause readers “to ooh and aah over notions that used to make it groan.” But even though an audience less erudite than Kim might be wowed by Foer’s techniques, the author isn’t claiming to be on the cutting edge of anything.
Asked last week about his experimental style, Foer said that “I hadn’t seen it anywhere before but neither would I assume it’s original. That wasn’t really the point. The singular purpose was to make the book as forceful as I could, to express as efficiently and as strongly as I could the things I wanted to.”
GETTING COZY
Anyhow, Foer says he isn’t aiming for public acclaim. “I wrote the book in these incredibly intimate settings—on my laptop propped up while I’m in bed, or at a desk, or in a room where I’m alone,” he says. “And then people read the book in their own intimate settings—in bed, in the bathtub, in the easy chair at home. Connecting these two intimate experiences is what publishing a book is all about.”
“I know what I want to do, and I know when I feel like I’m doing it or not doing it,” he says. Now, as long as he learns to say “I” and mean it, Foer can cozy up to readers for years to come. Take it from me—the little guy’s going far.
—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.
—Full book review coverage appears this Friday in the Arts section of The Crimson.