jonathan safran foer's everything is illuminated

Not all the victims, Foer knows, were real, live people.

Foer chose this quaint template for an ingenious reason: it evokes, at a primal cultural level, the benevolent, innocent New York that was vaporized, even as a fantasy, when the towers were toppled. A conscious homage to the Gotham wise-child genre, the book features several beloved stock characters, down to the nice doorman and other service folk who help their upper-middle-class young wards get around the urban jungle safely. Which is pretty much how things go in Foer's novel. Salinger's precocious, morbid, psychiatry-proof child philosophers and all those daunting city kids from children's books whose restless high spirits and social confidence get them into funny predicaments while their preoccupied but loving parents conduct their mysterious offstage grown-up business - business that they'll come home from just in time to save their offspring from real trouble. Oskar Schell is the 9-year-old New Yorker whose motormouth drives Foer's story. As Foer's new book demonstrates, some pages can even be left blank.

To Foer and his peers (who can't really be called experimental, since their signature high jinks, distortions and addenda first came to market many decades back and now represent a popular mode that's no more controversial than pre-ripped bluejeans), a novel is an object composed of pages tattooable with an infinite variety of nonsentence-like signs and signifiers. There's a distinction, of course, and Foer is just the sort of brainy, playful young writer, his critical faculties honed by the academy and his multimedia sensibilities shaped by the Internet and heaven knows what else, for whom this arcane distinction is second nature and a perfect excuse for fun and games. 11 novel whose last pages include a little flip-book of video stills arranged in reverse order to create a fleeting, blurry movie of an actual human being careering upward through the sky toward the top of the fiery doomed tower from which (softheaded moralists will note, to the bafflement of hardened aesthetes) the fresh-and-blood person on the film was - in undoctored, forward-rushing fact-jumping or falling to his death.ĭoes a novel with such a high-concept visual kicker (and sensational book-club conversation starter) even need a title at all?īesides containing a wealth of other photographs and attention-grabbing graphic elements, Jonathan Safran Foer's second novel (his first was 'Everything Is Illuminated') positively teems with text - most, but not all, of which takes the form of prose. ITS title is 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,' but it will also be known, inevitably, perhaps primarily, and surely intentionally, as that new Sept.

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE By Jonathan Safran Foer.

Jonathan safran foer's everything is illuminated