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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Noah Cicero, ULA review blog editor
Extremely Cheesy and Incredibly Shallow:
A Movie Review on Foer's New Book
Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is
not literature, it is blatantly a movie. I do not know how to review movies,
and I don’t watch movies that star Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, who would
be in this movie. So this is what I’m going to do, I’m just going to show
the different aspects of the book the best I can. Even though considering
this literature is absurd.
It must said that the book cost $24.95. It is the most expensive book I
have ever bought and by the time you read this it will be brought back for
being broken because I thought I bought a book and somehow got a
movie.
There are 368 pages in this book. Here is a list of things that were on
pages that had barely anything on them at all, if anything.
26 pages with one line.
2 and a half pages of numbers.
49 pages of pictures.
4 pages of words written in magic marker in different colors.
21 blank pages.
15 pages of someone who jumped out of the world trade center.
3 words written on top of other words... it is unreadable.
That’s 129 useless pages. Only 248 pages are left with story on them.
Foer gives a new definition to the word “filler” with Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close.
Plot: A nine-year-old boy named Oskar's dad dies in the 9-11 attacks.
Oskar finds a key in an envelope in his dad’s closet with the name Black
written on it. He goes around the city going to every house that has
someone named Black in it. He meets a 103 year old man that hasn’t left
his apartment in over twenty-years and they investigate together. Then
he digs up his father’s grave for no apparent reason I could figure out.
Then he loves his mom at the end because he has gotten over his father
or something absurd like that. Also in the story there are two other small
plots. One is Oskar’s mute grandfather who writes these shallow things
down all the time. And his grandmother complaining that his mute
grandfather won’t have sex with her. It also has flashbacks with Oskar
and his father like any good movie.
Character Development: The lead character Oskar is a nine-year-old boy
that acts in Hamlet plays at school even though 3rd graders in reality don’t
have Hamlet Plays at schools. Oskar is part of an upper class family that
owns a jewelry business and lives in Manhattan. Oskar takes French
lessons. Oskar’s character is completely absurd, he is nine and knows
these words and who these people are, Stephen Hawking, Balzac,
hypothermia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Greco roman wrestling,
rhetorical, logical, epidemiologist, Kofi Annan, terminal velocity, Jane
Goodall, Jacques Chirac, E.O.Wilson, Centrifugal force and Putin. The
suspension of disbelief was lost a little having a nine year old that knew
what those words meant and who those people were. He also writes
letters to Stephen Hawking all the time asking to be part of his research
team. And he is also a huge dork that thinks he is better than others
because he has knowledge and knows facts about random useless crap.
Oskar’s mother: is this useless woman who is superbly liberal and upper
class. And tries very hard to love her son. That’s all.
Oskar’s grandmother: She is a miserable woman who survived Dresden
and complains about her bad choices in life a lot, and tries very hard to
love Oskar.
Okskar’s grandpa: He is a mute that was in Dresden. He has “yes” on
one hand and “no” on the other so he can answer quicker. He left Oskar’s
grandma before Oskar was born. He comes back at the end of the of the
book and reunites with his family and makes amends. I puked when I read
that. And worked very hard to love his son and grandson very much.
Oskar’s father: He tucks Oskar in at night. Played games with Oskar, and
worked very hard to love his son very much.
The characters are really silly as you can see. Total stock movie
characters.
The Style: Concerning the style Foer applies The Green Day theory of
mainstream art. He does 1/10th underground/experimental literary
devices so the mainstream world will be better to take him and give him
good reviews. And his fans think he is inventive and experimental when
in actuality he is just posturing. First the book has pictures resembling
zeens. Then when he writes paragraphs in the voice of Oskar he writes in
a Franesca Lia Block style perfectly, basically a quick form of writing that
became popular in young adult books in the nineties. His dialogue is a
mockery, he does this thing where he sticks all the dialogue into one
paragraph and writes “she said” before the sentence they say. It is
Hemingway dialogue through and through but it poses as inventive when
all jammed together. At times he tries to write absurdist dialogue but it
comes off stupid because it is between a nine-year-old and a
characterless upper class Harper’s liberal. Had those pages with one line
and the pages with no lines and a lot more. Real experimentalists like
Mark Sonnenfeld or Eckard Gerdes would laugh their balls off if someone
handed them Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud.
Also Foer switches voices in the book, which was done in Rules of
Attraction by Ellis, and done a lot better because those characters weren’t
stock and they were shallow but Ellis displayed them as shallow, while
Foer's characters are also shallow but Foer represents them as deep
thinking people. If Foer has read the authors I’ve named or not, it does not
matter, what matters is that he did not do one thing with style that has not
be done before, which fails to make the book inventive.
The thing about The Green Day theory of mainstream literature is that it
depends on the audience not being well read, just like it is for Green Day
who pushes their crap on kids who have never heard real punk. Which is
odd, because a large portion of Foer’s demographic are MFA students.
One would assume that a person that graduated with an MFA in creative
writing would be well read. Ha ha.
Voice: There are two main voices of the story, Oskar and the Grandpa.
Oskar’s voice reads like if Woody Allen was on an extreme amount of
crystal meth. Oskar is neurotic and narcissistic to the point of absurdity
and annoying to the point that by the end of every paragraph you feel like
throwing the book at the wall. If I met Oskar when I was nine I would have
beat his face in. He is about as lovable as a bad case of hemorrhoids.
The voice of the grandpa is even worse. Imagine a moronic schizophrenic
with a bad case of delusions of grandeur and that’s the voice. It was
punishment.
Cheesy Scenes: A nine-year-old son finds dead father’s key in a closet.
Father tells bedtime stories. Oskar’s mom finds new boyfriend type guy
shortly after father’s death. Nine-year-old son who just lost his dad gets
jealous of new guy. Has loving grandmother that has never been mean to
anyone in her life. Mute grandpa returns home. Mute grandpa makes
friends with nine year old grandson he has never met before.. 103 year
old man that has not left his apartment in over twenty years because he
lost his wife. 103 year old man gets hearing aides turned on by boy after
fifteen years of being off and he hears a flock birds fly by the window. A
woman lives at the top of the Empire State Building because she lost her
husband. Nine year old Oskar and his mute grandpa dig up his father’s
empty grave and the grandpa sticks the letters in it he always meant to
send to his son. Mom’s boyfriend type guy shares with Oskar that he lost
his family in a horrible accident too and Oskar likes him. And then Oskar
and his mom cry together about dad and the story ends happily ever
after.
Cheesy Lines: “I was trying to destroy the wall between me and my life.”
pg272. “Think of all the things that haven’t been born yet. All the babies.
Some never will be. Is that sad?” pg201. “I was angry because they were
my tears.” Pg308. “Life is scarier than death.” pg308. “My thoughts are
going down a chimney and burning.”pg183. “I regret that it takes a life to
learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I
would do things differently.” pg184. “Years were passing through the
spaces between moments.” Pg185. “That is what death is like. It doesn’t
matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how
good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we
would never have war anymore.” Pg189. “It was her touch that saved my
life.” Pg 214. “I’m so afraid of losing something I love I refuse to love
anything.” Pg216.
I went through forty five boxes of Lactaid while reading Extremely Close
and Incredibly Loud.
The Theme: How sad and tragic it is to be upper class living a completely
oblivious life and have something bad happen to you, and how we should
all feel sorry about it. Best seen in Oscar’s line, “We didn’t get that
something bad could happen to us.” pg300.
The Moral: Write a movie that looks like a book. So you can make money
off the book and movie at the same time.
Foer’s Class Ideology: When Oskar goes around talking to all the people
with the last name Black he runs into these characters, a rich liberal
epidemiologist who is somewhat artsy, the 46th richest person alive who
owns Picasso paintings, a 103 year old ex-war-reporter who is also a rich
liberal. Foer only discusses really the rich liberal characters that share
the same beliefs as Harper’s. The lower class people get a line or two that
are prototypical upper class caricatures of what lower class people are
like. Then with dazzling upper class precision he says exactly what he
thinks about lower class people. There is a part in the book when Oskar
goes to see a Black but finds out that she died in the 9-11 attacks. Oskar
finds out she worked a menial lower class job in the same building his dad
was in and thinks maybe they might have spoken in their last minutes on
this earth but says to himself, “They were obviously so different.” Pg196.
Obviously he was saying that the lady who died was stupid and even in
the last moments of his father’s life he would rather die silent then speak
to a person from the lower classes.
Foer’s Shallow Philosophy: even though he graduated from Princeton
with a Philosophy Degree: “I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life
was worth all the work it took to live. That exactly made it worth it?
What’s so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and
not even dreaming? What’s so great about feeling and dreaming?”
pg145. Writers used to be philosophers. Writers like Gogol, Dostoevsky,
Proust, Kafka, and Bataille influenced the works of Freud, Sartre, De
Beauvoir, Camus to create their philosophical and psychological theories.
And writers like Hesse, Bukowski, Kerouac, and many ULA writers have
used philosophical writings to give a more accurate character
development and intense plot. Foer does none of that, he just vomits out
Dawson’s Creek and Felicity nonsense. Which is odd because his
demographic are college educated people, so are colleges putting out
people who only posture at being intelligent?
Psychoanalysis: There is a quote by James T. Farrel on The Sun Also
Rises by Ernest Hemingway. "Whenever there is a widespread mood of
disillusionment caused by an event as catastrophic as a world war, that
mood is to be nihilistic and rather adolescent in character unless it serves
as the basis for a radical and progressive political orientation that aims to
change and better the world. This is illustrated in The Sun Also Rises. The
Characters express their bitterness, their feelings of disenchantment, with
calculated bravado. Their conversation is reduced to enthusiastic small
talk about their escapades. And this talk, as well as their actions, is largely
a matter of pose and gesture. They act like people who have not fully
grown up and who lack the self-awareness to realize this; in fact, they
possess no desire to grow up."
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the psychological manifestation of
that quote. Instead of having 9-11 serve as basis for change, Foer after 9-
11 reverts to the safety of childhood mentality. Oskar is not an example of
how the youth have been reduced to adolescence because he does not
display that all. He shows how he himself and many other people have
become nine-year-olds in maturity level and understanding of the world
around them. In the book there is no cause and effect, just a scared nine
year-old-boy who is narcissistic and neurotic who thinks 9-11 happened
only to him and that the only reason the terrorists did that was to disrupt
his peaceful upper class lifestyle. This is a book of a sick man turned
child who desperately needs help.
Back Jacket Blurbs: “Foer’s nine-year-old Oskar Schell, confronting the
cataclysm of our time, is an American original,” from Cynthia Ozick. First
this book is not a book but a movie, second Hollywood puts out a movie
like this book every two months, and three at once around Christmas.
And third the ‘cataclysm of time” was and is still for the bulk of America
the on going depression that followed.
“The powerful emotions generated feel deserved, not borrowed,” from
Salman Rushdie. I have no idea what that even means.
Amazon Five Star Reviews: His fans keep talking about how they cried
the whole time they read the book. I don’t know what they were crying
about. Every scene in this book has been seen in movies a million times,
they should be desensitized to it by now. And the reviews of the book
look commonly like movie reviews for cheesy movies starring Tom Hanks
or Kevin Kline.
Conclusion: If an adult reads this book and enjoys it they have the
mentality of a preteen.
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Author Bio from Houghton Mifflin Co. :
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the bestseller Everything Is Illuminated, named
Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the winner of numerous awards,
including the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New
York Public Library Young Lions Prize. Foer was one of Rolling Stone’s “People of the
Year” and Esquire’s “Best and Brightest.” Foreign rights to his new novel have already
been sold in ten countries. The film of Everything Is Illuminated, directed by Liev
Schreiber and starring Elijah Wood, will be released in August 2005. Extremely Loud
and Incredibly Close has been optioned for film by Scott Rudin Productions in
conjunction with Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures.
Foer lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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