OF A GOLDEN AGE

in my twentieth-century jewish-american literature class, we’ve started the semester with jonathan safran foer. (to conclude in april, we’ll be reading foer’s wife, nicole krauss.) his second book, extremely loud and incredibly close, left what can best described as a terrible taste in my mouth and i couldn’t even bring myself to finish it. this is rare! especially for a book that came highly praised!

needless to say, i was wary, very wary, of everything is illuminated. it’s similarly tricksy and postmodern, with layered narratives and a staccato, nonlinear structure. i read in about twenty-five pages and decided i hated it — it’s tedious and confusing, and i didn’t feel invested in the characters.

then something changed. i started to pull out my mechanical pencil to underline passages that made me laugh out loud, say “aww” to myself, want to cry a little. this happened more and more, and suddenly i could not put the book down. i LOVED it.

the last sixty pages were sort of stupid and anticlimactic. the postmodern gimmicks are distracting at first. but on the whole, this book is enormously pleasing. foer is a smart, stylish writer, walking a fine line between goofily-meta and well-balanced storytelling. he writes in a number of different voices in this novel, and each is fleshed out and expressed fully.

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