Word: foer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...however, remarkable in other ways. Right now Foer is the LeBron James of the literary world--young, preternaturally mature, enviably well compensated (he got a seven-figure advance for his last novel), and coming off a wildly successful rookie season. In 2002 his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, put him in the first rank of interesting young fiction writers. The movie version, starring Elijah Wood, is due out in August...
Everyone is watching Foer's new book, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Houghton Mifflin; 326 pages), which drops later this month, to see if it holds up. It does, and more, but it also makes clear that Foer is different from other hyperachieving young writers. Where young Turks like Dave Eggers get tagged as ironic, and even snarky, Foer is profoundly serious. The way some other 28-year-olds are interested in beer and video games, Foer is interested in the Truth with a capital T, and he's not afraid to go for all the big themes at once...
...hero of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is someone even younger, smarter and less hip than Foer. Oskar Schell is a weird, compulsive, deeply nerdy 9-year-old kid who lost his father in the destruction of the World Trade Center. Oskar's many obsessions include physicist Stephen Hawking, playing the tambourine, looking for mistakes in the New York Times, and inventing things: "There are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?" And so on. When Oskar discovers...
...subjects for fiction go, 9/11 is pretty much in the maximum-degree-of-difficulty category. "I was very hesitant," Foer remembers. "I felt like I wasn't sure how much it was my story to tell." But he thought somebody needed to write about the attacks in a way that was depoliticized, stripped of ideology, of everything but pure tragedy. "So much of the reason I wrote the book was because I was tired of the tellings of [the Twin Tower bombings] having messages, having points. What I wanted was exactly to make something that didn't have a point...
...tempting at times to resist Foer's writing. There is a certain quirky cuteness to Oskar that can be cloying. When he trots out yet another amusing hobby or one of his many idiosyncratic verbal mannerisms--he pronounces acronyms like ESP phonetically; instead of saying something is great, he says it's "one hundred dollars"--you have to fight back the image of Jonathan Lipnicki, the kid from Jerry Maguire. But these doubts are pulverized by the book's devastating set pieces, which are of the kind only a genuine talent who knows exactly what he wants...