Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Deborah Solomon's fawning profile of Foer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/magazine/27FOER.html?ex=1267246800&en=adbd05d8d5964ba3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

Excerpts from NYObserver's spoof of the piece:

http://www.gawker.com/news/media/new-york-observer/letters-from-a-young-writer-foer-and-solomon-fanfic-034624.php

"'Tragedy primes one for humor,' Foer said. 'And humor primes one for tragedy. They amplify each other. As a writer, I am trying to express those things that are most scary to me, because I am alone with them. Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.'"

And: "Foer's modesty, you might assume, is intended to mask the breadth of his ambition, lest he appear too boastful or striving. But...I came to view his reticence as rooted more in fear than in pride. As he wrote in an e-mail message one evening: 'Thinking on the ride back from D.C.: Time heals all wounds. But what if time is the wound?'"

Or how about: "When we sat down, [Foer] handed me a gift and admonished me to open it with the utmost care and delicacy. Inside, sandwiched between two stiff pieces of gray cardboard, I found a surprise -- a sheet of typing paper, completely blank and yellowed at the edges. He quickly explained that it had been culled from the desk of the long-dead Isaac Bashevis Singer and was one in a sizable collection of blank papers he has amassed from his fellow writers and artists over the years."

Does it get any twee-er than this?

Anyway what got me about that NYTBR review was that it was so non-scathing, or at least not-openly scathing; the tone was kind of like a guy holding up something really disgusting (say, a turd) and just casually pointing out that, you know, here’s a lumpy bit, and this appears to be some corn, and there is an odor involved, etc. It wasn’t even the discussion of current middlebrow “postmodern” tics that made the thing seem bad—it was one (presumably carefully-selected) paragraph quotation, offering pretty good evidence that Foer wasn’t exactly surpassing any expectations you’d have of the concept, and in fact seemed a little rote and subpar about it. I seriously hope I can one day write a review this restrained and convincing, just indicating the features of the thing and yet somehow leading readers to an obvious conclusion about it.

I agree it's not ungrammatical, though the use of two trite and meaningless intensifiers ("extremely" and "incredibly") in such close proximity does strike me as poor style.

That's pretty much OTM, except that towards the end I thought the review got pretty obviously sarcastic.

I know, but it still bugs me. I think Hurting's right - there's something McSweeneys-esque about it that rubs me the wrong way.

Anyway, the only thing I've read of Foer's at this point is the excerpt from Everything is Illuminated that ran in The New Yorker around the time that book came out, which was mildly entertaining, but not enough so that I felt curious to read the book.

http://www.nypress.com/18/15/news&columns/harrysiegel.cfm

(haha, do a Google search on "loathsome" and see what comes up...)

Did anyone read the Solomon profile? It's funny, I finally read it to the end, and it mentions this incident ("the explosion") that I now remember from when I was a little kid (I'm 2 or 3 years younger than him). The thing is, he describes it as the formative event in his life, which I'm not doubting, but the other kid, his friend, was MUCH more affected by it. The other kid was a friend's older brother, and he went through years of physical therapy after this explosion, had terrible scars all over his skin, etc.

Probably no one cares, but it was strange to have a childhood memory brought back by a magazine profile of a now famous acquaintance.