The Foer Dynasty

Jonathan Safran Foer has always fascinated me, and I recently finished reading his book titled Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close after reading his novel Everything is Illuminated last year. I read it in one day; it was one of those books that you really don't want to stop reading. It tells the story of Oskar Schell, a 9 year old kid who's father died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City. Oskar becomes obsessed with a key in a jar he finds in his dad's room, that has the word "Black" written on it. He decides to find every person with the last name of Black in the city to see if they know what it's about. Oskar is undeniably extremely advanced for his age, and defines himself as a pacifist, atheist, and vegan, among other things. Foer's writing is decidedly post-modern, and the book is interspersed with drawings and photographs, different narrators, and a non-linear format. I was extremely moved by the book when I finished it, and the last page of the book had one of those great lines that nearly made me cry.

After I began reading Foer, a friend of mine sent me an article about his two brothers, also writers- his older brother, Franklin, is an editor of The New Republic, and his younger brother, Joshua, is a freelance journalist who sold his first novel for a reported 1.2 million dollars. This enraged many in the literary world; so many people want to be published, and the "Third Foer" is able to get a million dollar advance without any prior publications seems more than a little shady- many assumed, reasonably so, that it is his familial relationships that propelled such a sum. On March 3rd, when the book is actually released, will we actually see if it's good or not. But I really think people are going to hate it no matter the content, because he is part of that "Foer Dynasty."

The Foer dynasty has always seemed a little creepy to me; here were kids who's parents had them compile information on subjects and give presentations on said subjects regularly. Fans of the Foer family say this isn't anything untoward- the three boys all suffered from paralyzing shyness at a young age, and this was a tactic to help them overcome it. Foer haters, of course, talk about how wrong it was to make their children do this; labeling it as "Writer bootcamp." The boys were all trained to be writers; isn't there something a little disconcerting about that? Shouldn't writing be innate, not something your parents pushed you towards?

I can certainly relate to that. My parents are both incredibly literary minded, and from a young age I was told how important it was to read books of "high literary merit." My dad regularly gave me book lists, as did my mom- Edgar Allan Poe stories were my bedtime stories. It was my parents' influence that got me to read The New Yorker, James Kirkwood, Bertolt Brecht, Tony Kushner, and many of the authors I love are ones that my parents love. I like that I read books that I feel are highly regarded, and how I do have a pretty good sense of cultural literacy. But it IS a little disconcerting, because I don't know whether I like Bertolt Brecht and Anthony Lane because I was sort of trained to like them by my parents, or whether it was my own discovery. I'm not going to do a Carrie Bradshaw-esque question of the week here, but it is an interesting idea.

Another problem people have with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that it has 9/11 as a backdrop, and one of the most difficult parts of the book to read is when Oskar is listening to the messages that his dad left in the time after the towers were hit. It was published in 2005, and was one of the first fiction books to incorporate the national tragedy into it's plot. Many critics felt this was too soon, and the book received a gigantic polarized response. In one interesting review titled "Extremely Cloying and Incredibly False: Why the author of Everything is Illuminated is a fraud and a hack" (Available to read here: http://www.nypress.com/article-11418-extremely-cloying-incredibly-false.html) author Harry Siegel wrote:

Foer, squeezing his brass ring, doesn't have the excuse of having written the day or the week after the attack. In a calculated move, he threw in 9/11 to make things important, to get paid. Get that money son; Jay-Z would be proud. Why wait to have ideas worth writing when you can grab a big theme, throw in the kitchen sink, and wear your flip-flops all the way to the bank? How could someone so willfully young be so unambitious?


Other critics criticized the novel for bearing stark similarities to his wife Nicole Krauss's The History of Love. (An article about that is here- people have way too much fun mocking his title: http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a4048.asp) Foer has also been labeled a narcissist, for basically inserting himself into each of his books (Oskar being his 9-year-old self) and, of course, a hack.


I don't know why I've spent this entire blog talking about how everyone hates Foer when, as I explained in my opening paragraph, I was so moved by Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It's strange; all the criticisms I see of his book and his family seem very valid to me. I can definitely see where they come from, when usually I'm blindsided by my love for an author to accept any criticism. (I'm oddly protective of writers I like in that respect.) Was it too soon to publish a book with 9/11 in it in 2005? Do Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss collaborate too much? I don't know, maybe. All I know is that while I can see the criticisms people have, and understand their validity, I don't subscribe to them. Foer's novel was one of those rare novels that provoked such an emotional response, I'm sort of blinded to judging it. 


I'm planning on reading Foer's non-fiction novel Eating Animals soon. I'm excited for it. I like Jonathan Safran Foer. 


Here is another review of the book that explains what I was trying to in a much more eloquent matter:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jun/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview22


(Big thanks to one of my best friends for getting me into Foer; who, for anonymity's sake, I'll only call Safran Flyte (homage to her favorite author/book character) and providing me with a lot of the information I used to craft this.)