Word: foer
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...Everything Is Illuminated,” his continued reluctance to just be himself, instead of impersonating a grandmother, a young child, or a goofy foreigner as he has done so far, has gotten frustrating. Instead of writing about what 9/11 was like for him, in other words, which Foer feels incapable of doing, he chose the nine-year-old Oskar Schell, whose father was killed during a meeting at the Windows of the World restaurant. Foer presumes that he knows how it would feel, and although he may come close (most of us are fortunate enough not to know...
...goal in life to narrate as myself,” Foer told his audience at the Brattle. “I’m infinitely jealous of people who have diaries that they believe in, and feel like are expressions of who they are. I’ve tried many many times and every time I sit down to write, it sounds totally inauthentic. Sometimes you have to make something unrealistic in order to make it believable, as I aspire to in my book...
...golden when it comes to creativity, there’s a good reason why aspiring writers are always instructed to write what they know—to mine their own lives for inspiration instead of trying to concoct some purely foreign, purely fictional world which they have never experienced. Foer ignores this advice demonstratively. Unconcerned with believability, he says, and unafraid to try to say something new about the Dresden firebombing and the Nazi invasion of Europe, Foer does just about everything in his two books besides show what it’s like...
...Everything Is Illuminated” succeeds in spite of this gimmick. But this success is not sustainable. Until Foer gets comfortable in his own shoes, he won’t be able to transcend mere impersonation, and his characters will forever feel slightly inhuman. Throwing his voice is not a solution, but a shortcut, and the more he allows himself to take it, the less likely it is that he’ll be able to communicate his feelings with the directness he strives...
Granted, “Extremely Loud” had a lot to live up to—a curse on any sophomore effort that is made only worse by the fact that Foer, on account of his young age, is expected to outdo himself with every successive outing. When the debut was published, he was heralded in the press as a “certified wunderkind” and an “obvious talent,” while the book itself was uniformly dubbed “impressive”—a dubious honor which implies, like...