Salon.com > Jonathan Safran Foer

“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”: Post-9/11 trauma, made cute and dull

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 20:34:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote a largely negative review of Kenneth Lonergan's long-delayed "Margaret," a sprawling and ambitious attempt at weaving a multi-character cinematic tapestry about life in post-9/11 New York. I stand by every word, but I also understand why a group of critics and cinephiles have campaigned to get "Margaret" on the awards-season radar screen, in the face of Fox Searchlight's evident decision to abandon it on the curb like a stillborn hamster. "Margaret" is coming back to New York's Cinema Village this weekend, and if you're in the neighborhood and want to see a flawed, big-hearted, intermittently marvelous and maddening epic about the legacy of 9/11, go check it out. You certainly won't find any such grand emotions in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," which renders Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling 2005 novel into unconvincing Hollywood mush.

Why we haven’t seen a great 9/11 novel

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 19:01:00 +0000

In the 1990s, the haute-postmodern novelist Don DeLillo liked to say that the terrorist had supplanted the novelist in cultural importance. "Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror," he told the New York Times Book Review. "Today, the men who shape and influence human consciousness are the terrorists."

It was the sort of stylized, mandarin pronouncement that seemed terribly sophisticated at the time, although if you thought about it for a bit, what did it really mean? There's a lot more to consciousness than fear, and even name-brand terrorists like Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski go down in history as lethal crackpots, not transformative figures. Harriet Beecher Stowe they are not.

But surely 9/11 was a special case? An attack so catastrophic, with such a high death toll and striking so hard at the root of American complacency must have unique import, a significance that, in turn, only novelists have the power to address at length and in depth, with the intimate imagination that fiction is uniquely suited to employ. Right?

Jonathan Safran Foer’s beef with factory farms

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:07:00 +0000

Jonathan Safran Foer is a strict vegetarian, but his most recent book, "Eating Animals," is not a screed against meat. It is, rather, an indictment of the corrupt, large-scale factory farming that dominates the American meat market. A journalistic work with a novelistic feel, the book is the result of three years investigating the U.S. meat industry, and it weaves together animal activist and farmer interviews with statistical research and even memoir to provide a sweeping account of Big Beef and its social, economical and environmental impact. Descriptions of animals suffering on the "kill floor" are enough to incite squirms from even non-animal lovers, but cruelty is not Foer's only grievance: There are health concerns and devastating environmental damage at issue as well.

Not just filmed but “Illuminated”

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:12:00 +0000

Liev Schreiber, 37, is among the most respected actors of his generation, with major roles on stage (he recently finished a run as Richard Roma in the Broadway production of "Glengarry Glen Ross," for which he won a Tony) and screen, where he's had savvy supporting roles in big movies such as "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004) and the "Scream" series, and memorable parts in a body of highly regarded smaller films, including "A Walk on the Moon" (1999), "Walking and Talking" (1996), "The Daytrippers" (1996) and "Party Girl" (1995).

But it wasn't until he became a director, Schreiber says, that he started caring about the critics. When I met to talk with him recently in New York, he noticed a local paper as we sat down.

"Oh, it's a review," he said darkly, and tossed it out of the way. "I never took things personally as an actor," he said. "I never took things personally at all, not until I started doing this."

“Everything Is Illuminated”

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 07:00:00 +0000

In the books-vs.-movies debate, we all have strong feelings about how well (or how poorly) the novels we care about translate to the screen. But what about the novels we don't have any feelings for at all -- the books that we attempted, in good faith, to trudge through because they'd been recommended by a friend or gotten good reviews?

Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated" was jubilantly celebrated when it was published in 2001, in reviews laden with words like rich and deeply moving. Apparently, being deeply moved is the reward for wading through pages of the sort of prose whose wordy digressions and repetitiveness are part of its style (and part of its challenge).

I attempted to read "Everything Is Illuminated," very much wanting to get to the stuff that had so deeply moved so many people. I wanted to catch that mechanical rabbit. It eluded my grasp, but at least Liev Schreiber, in his film version of the book, ultimately -- after a number of false starts and hiccups -- manages to grab it by the ears.

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 08:00:00 +0000

I have to admit that I haven't been too keen to read any of the half-dozen or so 9/11 novels marking this season's fiction lists. That date still feels too close, too fresh in the memory to necessitate a literary reminder, too difficult to render in fiction without the kind of overearnestness that ultimately estranges the reader from the emotional center of the event being described. That's why I was surprised to find that Jonathan Safran Foer's touching account of the grief and disorientation of 9/11's aftermath is also strangely healing.

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is the story of Oskar Schell, an eccentric 9-year-old, the kind of child that adults adore and kids love to pick on. Oskar -- like most of the characters in this book -- isn't exactly what you would call a realistic invention, but he is nonetheless an endearing and funny narrator. A sort of male, science-geek version of Eloise, he's precocious and independent, coming and going from his Upper West Side home without much adult interference. He dresses exclusively in white, plays the tambourine as he walks down the street, makes jewelry, obsessively searches the Internet and proclaims his favorite book to be "A Brief History of Time."

The sound bite and the fury

Sat, 19 Apr 2003 19:45:00 +0000

Should celebrity be classified as a controlled substance? Consider first the available medical literature: rambling and confused statements, delusional behavior, outbursts of megalomania, and in the case of People magazine's Steven Cojocaru, unflattering shags -- all triggered by the sudden and confounding infusion of quasi-fame. The blazingly dysfunctional path of today's insta-celebrities is not something children should be exposed to or, come to think of it, most adults. Enough fooling around, then. Bring on the PSA campaign.

And for campaign spokesman, please consider James Frey, the rising author who has, in effect, done the thing he swore never to do: He has traded in one addiction for another. That is, he has written a ballsy, bone-deep memoir about coming off drugs -- titled "A Million Little Pieces" -- which he is now promoting with such hopped-up, synthetically fueled mania that reading his interviews becomes a form of retox.

"A Million Little Pieces" has all the hallmarks of a Publishing Event. An eye-grabbing cover: the Buñuellian image of a human hand sheathed in micro-pills. A movie-ready subject: the near-death spiral and phoenixlike rebirth of a rich suburban kid. (Boy, Interrupted.) A string of high-profile blurbers: Pat Conroy, Bret Easton Ellis, Gus Van Sant. And, most telling of all, a publicity Anschluss, engineered by Random House's genteel Nan Talese imprint.

“Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer

Fri, 26 Apr 2002 16:16:00 +0000

There are two stories wound together in this first novel, and as is often the case, one is more engaging than the other. The first describes a visit to Ukraine by a 20-year-old American named Jonathan Safran Foer. (You just have to ignore the fact that the device of putting a character with the author's name in a novel outlived its freshness before Foer was born, in 1977.) This part of the book is told by Alexander Perchov, a Ukrainian, also 20, who gets shanghaied into acting as Foer's tour guide and semi-competent translator when Foer visits the country. Like many Jews of his generation, Foer wants to touch the pulse of his roots, to see the village of Trachimbrod, where his grandfather was born and raised, and to meet the woman whose family saved him from the Nazis. The two young men are trading manuscripts, and so the narrative alternates excerpts from Alex's account of Foer's visit and his letters to Jonathan with installments of Jonathan's own novel.