You Can Only Hope To Contain Him
I sensed movement beneath the earth a month ago, when a reporter from Elle emailed me to ask for a comment about Jonathan Safran Foer. She was writing a profile of him. But she caught me at the beginning of my relatively non-confrontational anti-cat-fight period, so I declined.
Now Houghton Mifflin has posted this excerpt of Safran Foer's forthcoming novel, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close.
Lest I find myself accused of professional jealousy and bad faith, I'm going to withhold all public judgment of this book, that I haven't yet read, about a nine-year-old boy genius searching through the five boroughs of New York to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center. I will let you, my readers, provide comments instead, either about the excerpt linked above, or, even better, on the actual book when it's published.
One reader has already chimed in:
"Alas, it's as bad as it reads. I'd known about the premise of that book for a long time. This gave me confidence that it would be a disaster, but he's fulfilled even my wildest dreams. That said, I
was fully prepared to eat crow if it was any good. Luckily, I don't have to.
A 9-11 premise? Come on. NOBODY can handle that yet. Think about "A Farewell to Arms" and "All Quiet on the Western Front," the two best novels about WWI. Hemingway and Remarque worked until 1929 -- ten years after the war -- to process those events and get the books right. And that was in an age when people actually read books.
I'd love to have Foer's money and fame, but he simply cannot write. He's chattering on paper."
Again, though. That's just one man's opinion, not mine. And that man could be jealous, bitter, or wrong. Other opinions are always welcome here.