Teaching Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Note to self: Teaching Assignment for Engl 105. Give students Deborah Solmon's New York Times Magazine profile of Jonathan Safran Foer to read before they begin Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Then, after they've finished Foer's second novel (perhaps before?) have students read and write a response paper that addresses issues raised in various periodicals, e.g., Wyatt Mason's review in the London Review of Books and Vivian Gornick's review in The Nation.

Ask students to consider the difference between the two genres--the celebrity profile (filled with industry details about the large advances Foer received for his first two novels) and the critical review (which strives to situate the novel within a larger context). The point here will be to emphasize the different types of discourse that shape our reception of literary texts, to demonstrate how literary texts are marketed as entertainment commodities produced by celebrity artists, just like Hollywood films, etc., and to provide examples of more thoughtful engagements with the text

I'm particularly interested in hearing what students have to say about Gornick's harsh assessment of Foer's novel, particularly what she regards as Foer's exploitative treatment of 9/11. Gornick writes, "If Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is as popular with readers as Everything Is Illuminated, it will be because Foer is indeed the wunderkind the country needs and therefore deserves: a writer of talent who exploits holocaust to mythicize the most aggressive self-pity in modern American history, the kind that feeds relentlessly on a nostalgia that seriously reduces whatever chance we have of understanding what we are living through." If I understand Gornick correctly, she objects to Foer's decision to use a nine-year-old narrator as the primary focalizing consciousness through which we perceive post-9/11 America because doing so encourages readers to identify with an innocent and drastically limits the scope of the reflection on terrorism. Thus, we're presented with a novel that, like so much of the mass media's coverage of the war on terror, effectively asks the naive question "Why is this happening?" rather than "Why is this being done to me?"

I'll have to reread Extremely Loud again before providing a thorough response, but my initial impulse is to agree with Gornick's assessment. Although I enjoyed reading Foer's novel, my overall impression was that it was Vonnegut Lite. (Here, it might be interesting to compare Foer's treatment of the bombing of Dresden with Vonnegut's in Slaughterhouse Five. I don't mean this to sound as damning as it might. Unlike many academics who dismiss Vonnegut's writing as being too simplistic and too moralizing, I greatly admire Vonnegut's narrative technique, which is deceptively simple. But Vonnegut's academic reception is another topic altogether. By way of contast though, I would argue that Vonnegut's books provide far more insights, both psychological and sociopolitical, into the factors that contribute to what in retrospect we describe as history's tragedies.