Critics+Views

= Critic's Views = Kirkus Reviews This brilliant fiction works thrilling variations on, and consolations for, its plangent message: that "in the end, everyone loses everyone." [1 Jan 2005, p.8] Library Journal Rebecca Miller Foer's excellent second novel vibrates with the details of a current tragedy but successfully explores the universal questions that trauma brings on its floodtide. [1 Mar 2005, p.78] Publishers Weekly Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty. [31 Jan 2005, p.46] Salon Priya Jain It seems clear at this point that Foer has successfully graduated from being a one-off wunderkind to an accomplished and graceful writer San Francisco Chronicle Tom Barbash There are moments when Foer comes close to brilliance -- to a startling emotional acuity, but too many times he's undone by cleverness, by the need to perform. Booklist John Green [Oskar's] first-person narration of his journey is arrestingly beautiful, and readers won't soon forget him. [1 F [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books75.gif width="53" height="37"]] The New Yorker John Updike The book’s hyperactive visual surface covers up a certain hollow monotony in its verbal drama. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books75.gif width="53" height="37"]] The Onion A.V. Club Andy Battaglia It's a testament to Foer's writing that his dazzling way with words never trumps the emotions he serves, and that those emotions--pain, somberness, regret--never lose sight of the love and hope they coexist with. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books75.gif width="53" height="37"]] London Review Of Books Wyatt Mason Once you get past some sloppy stage-setting and the unlikeliness of Oskar’s quest... the novel earns your trust. Whereas Everything Is Illuminated grows more ponderous and preposterous, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close improves and deepens. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books75.gif width="53" height="37"]] Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese Even if a few of his gambits fall flat, it's hard to fault a 28-year-old novelist for such an intense hunger to connect. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books75.gif width="53" height="37"]] Houston Chronicle Fritz Lanham Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close could easily have been a cloying, incoherent mess, but it isn't. It's really a lovely book, humane and quirky and for the most part hard to put down. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books75.gif width="53" height="37"]] Washington Post Ron Charles Despite the dramatically contemporary subject of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer hasn't invented something new as much as shifted the plot of his spectacularly successful Everything Is Illuminated. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books75.gif width="53" height="37"]] The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Annabel Lyon If you have not read Everything is Illuminated and don't recognize the parallels -- the charming central voice, pathos-laden story of the ancestors, sense of vast conspiracy, big historical issues -- you'll take pleasure in seeing them here for the first time. [2 Apr 2005, p.D5] [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books75.gif width="53" height="37"]] Los Angeles Times Richard Eder [An] ambitious and in some ways impressive book. [3 Apr 2005] [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books75.gif width="53" height="37"]] The Spectator Olivia Glazebrook From the very first page it is a hugely involving read. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books75.gif width="53" height="37"]] Sydney Morning Herald Mark Tewfik For all its flaws, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a serious, clever, funny work, which should be read and remembered. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books50.gif width="53" height="37"]] New York Review Of Books Keith Gessen The skepticism and satire that marked the best parts of Everything Is Illuminated are nowhere in evidence here. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books50.gif width="53" height="37"]] The Nation Vivian Gornick 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. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books50.gif width="53" height="37"]] The Guardian Michel Faber Looking back at my jottings in the margins of Foer's new book, I can't deny how frequently and furiously I've scribbled "Aaaarrghh!" [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books50.gif width="53" height="37"]] Daily Telegraph Christopher Tayler The faults of his previous book are repeated and magnified: only readers with a very high tolerance for massive doses of whimsy stand a chance of making it all the way to the end. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books50.gif width="53" height="37"]] Daily Telegraph Anthony Quinn The impact of the story feels muffled by the fragmented, desultory structure and an eccentric textual surface that never looks more than a distracting gimmick. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books50.gif width="53" height="37"]] TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Henry Hitchings Each of these contrivances serves a purpose, and they combine to make the novel an aesthetically impressive artefact. But Foer's virtuosity is self-conscious, and his characters tend to seem like syntheses of quirks and stylized tics. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books50.gif width="53" height="37"]] Boston Globe Steve Almond The book is energetic, inventive, and ambitious, while also, at times, indulgent, contrived, and crushingly desperate for attention. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books50.gif width="53" height="37"]] Chicago Sun-Times Roger Gathman This time, the hawking of poignancy and tears is less successful, the authorial manipulation more unpleasant. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books50.gif width="53" height="37"]] The New York Times Book Review Walter Kirn No traditional story could put forward the tritenesses that Foer reshuffles, folds, cuts into strips, seals in seven separate envelopes and then, astonishingly, makes whole, causing the audience to ooh and aah over notions that used to make it groan. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books25.gif width="53" height="37"]] The Independent Scarlett Thomas There's no denying that Safran Foer is capable of exceptional writing, but in this book he seems to use it to suffocate his characters, rather in the same way that Jonathan Franzen did in The Corrections. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books25.gif width="53" height="37"]] Wall Street Journal Robert J. Hughes It is all supposed to be profound in a faux-innocent way, but it comes off as manipulative, like a ripped-from-the-headlines cop show with literary pretensions. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books25.gif width="53" height="37"]] Atlantic Monthly B. R. Myers After a while the gimmickry starts to remind one of a clown frantically yanking toys out of his sack: a fatal image. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books25.gif width="53" height="37"]] Chicago Tribune Melvin Jules Bukiet Extremely manipulative and incredibly cloying. [[image:http://www.metacritic.com/_images/scores/books25.gif width="53" height="37"]] The New York Times Michiko Kakutani While it contains moments of shattering emotion and stunning virtuosity that attest to Mr. Foer's myriad gifts as a writer, the novel as a whole feels simultaneously contrived and improvisatory, schematic and haphazard.