Jack Black's Body is SO Meta

JBB’s reviewer, Tommy Boy,
reviews reviewer Harry Siegel’s reign of HATE in
“Extremely Cloying & Incredibly False,”
a review of Jonathan Safran Foer's
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

A brief disclaimer before I launch into this article: I don't know Jonathan Safran Foer. I met him once at a bookstore and he struck me as a perfectly nice young man, very interested in what he writes and writing in general. But I did not get to know him, and cannot therefore say whether or not I like him as a person. He could very well be an absolute prick and I just happened to catch him on a good day, or if were we to hang out and chat, perhaps he could be the best friend I ever had. Who knows. I will say that I like his writing, but I do not feel that a completely accurate description of a person's character can be made via his writing.

The above is an important clarification before launching into this review of a review because our not-so-gentle reviewer, Harry Siegel, hates Jonathan Safran Foer (from here on out referred to as JSF—kinda like calling Justin Timberlake “JT” but without the singing or dancing or rebounding from Britney Spears with Cameron Diaz by way of Janet Jackson). And it isn't just an italicized kind of hatred; he HATES him. We're talking next-level-I'm-seeing-red-where's-that-damn-ax-when-you-need-it HATE. You'd think JSF ran over his brand new puppy or something.

This is not simply a hatred bred from extreme distaste for another's writing style or choice of subject, but hatred plus a belief that there is something morally bankrupt about this author. Which is fine. He can have his opinion, but the next time he chooses to write about it, he really ought to figure out a way to clearly state his objections without resorting to an all-out personal attack and try harder (if he tried at all) not to come across as a caricature of “Angry Homer.”

The one truly positive thing that can be said about “Extremely Cloying & Incredibly False” is that Siegel lays his cards on the table early. In his very first sentence, which refers to JSF's claim that people’s suspicions of his book demonstrate that “too many people hate art,” Siegal states, “Call me a hater then.” This certainly sets the tone. Siegel goes on to exclaim that he does not care for JSF in the least. “It's bad form to call a living writer corrupt and debased, which is why I begged out of a review I'd been assigned of Jonathan Safran Foer's highly touted debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated.” This wouldn't be a bad way to approach a work and an author that one truly hates, were it not for Siegel’s follow-up. Instead of addressing in detail, point by point, what exactly makes Siegel detest JSF and his books, he expands his attack outwards, pulling all sorts of extraneous materials into his critique of JSF and his more recent novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

Mr. Siegel has opted out of a review of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and has instead written an attack on the state of an industry and a generation whose goals in writing he believes to be purely pecuniary. “I understand how a young man could write such a book [Everything Is Illuminated], but not why he would have it published, and certainly not how it could be acclaimed as marking the arrival of a major new talent. (The $500,000 advance, and later nearly $1 million for the movie rights, and another $1 million for the follow-up, may have helped.)” And this is pretty much what Siegel's claim comes down to: JSF did it for the money.

This is also pretty much why Siegel's whole article is just a bunch of scribbling. Instead of addressing what JSF may have been attempting to do in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Mr. Siegel had already decided what he was going to think before he read the book. His prejudice against almost anything our author may wish to say is evident from the start. Hell, just read his description of Oskar Schell, the protagonist of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and the parallels he draws with JSF's own life. One can see that it doesn't matter much what JSF might want to say, our Mr. Siegel ain't gonna listen.

Foer's latest saintly stand-in...nine-year-old Oskar Schell, who has a business card, speaks French, walks the city at odd hours by himself, writes letters to Stephen Hawking and other luminaries, knows more facts than any of the adults he speaks with, flirts with women, is a vegan, an atheist and otherwise equal parts unbelievable and unbearable. Foer, I should note, is a Jewish atheist, wrote letters to Susan Sontag when he was nine, and otherwise sounds like he'd make unbearable company, though perhaps not as much as the obnoxiously precocious, overeducated brat Schell.

So Siegel doesn’t harbor a fondness for precocious Jewish intellectuals. One wonders, is his encyclopedic knowledge of JSF's early epistolary exercises another justification for his inordinate hatred? And I'm not even going to bother detailing his later (and lamer) complaints about the book itself; I have a headache already. So let's just skip ahead, eh?

“And with the same easy spirit in which he pillages other authors' techniques, stripping them of their context and using them merely for show, he snatches 9/11 to invest his conceit with gravitas, thus crossing the line that separates the risible from the villainous.” It took him a while (and if you read the review, you'll know just how long), but Siegel finally returns to a more pointed explication of his loathing for JSF. Were it not for the inclusion of 9/11, and if this was simply a book about the loss of a parent, Siegel would have hated it and moved on. He would have continued to believe that JSF does not deserve the acclaim he has received, but he might not have declaimed him as “vile.” The review gains some worth, however, when Siegel puts forward a terribly dangerous idea that must be countered.

The book's theme—the sense of connection we all feel when the coffee or acid hits and everything is illuminated, the brain-gurble and twitch and self-pity we all know better than to write about—have nothing to do with the attack on the towers, or with Dresden and Hiroshima, which Foer tosses in just to make sure we understand what a big and important book we're dealing with.

So he hates how JSF writes. And he hates the ideas and beliefs he explores in his books. Cool. So he thinks everyone would have been better served had JSF never laid down a single word on even the smallest scrap of paper. Fine. So he attacks JSF for addressing a topic that, in Siegal’s opinion, JSF has no right to even glance at. Yeah, not OK.

One of the essential points of writing is to deal with issues and ideas in ways that are not the norm and may, in fact, be a good deal more incisive than what is covered by the norm. Writing a book about 9/11 as told through the eyes of a little boy—a precocious and potentially annoying as all get-out little boy, perhaps—is just as valid as writing a poem about a gas attack in the trenches; temporal proximity isn't really the key.

Oskar’s struggle to understand what the hell has happened to him and his family is interwoven with the story of his grandparents—their escape from Dresden, their grief after the fire-bombing, and their futile attempts to regroup through silence and “Nothing Places.” It is the interaction of these stories, the fusion of Dresden and 9/11, that is the strongest aspect of the book. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is not a tale of regeneration and healing; the really interesting thing about the book is that we have the story as seen through the eyes of the grandparents, who have never recovered from Dresden, and the grandson, who may never recover from 9/11, but not the generation in-between. The voice of Thomas—Oskar’s father, the causal link between grandparent and grandson, and the impetus for the search around which the book is structured—is recorded on an answering machine on that fateful Tuesday morning, but we never hear his story. We never really know who he was and we never will.

JSF recognizes that it’s impossible for things to go back to the way they were before, no matter how hard one tries to force them. He implies that imagination can only go so far before it collides with the bedrock of reality—as poor Oskar discovers at quest's end. The end of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is presented in the form of a flipbook in which Oskar reorganizes a series of pictures of a body falling from the towers so that that the figure falls up and away from certain death.

Siegal reduces this flipbook to a mere contrivance that “serves no purpose but to remind us that this is an important book.” I would have to disagree. The flipbook is far from just a cute way of winding things up with a dash of daring. Trying to replay the events of 9/11 backwards to imagine a world where skyscrapers are not attacked and people don't fall from the sky is, in this instance, an archetype of innocence lost. It is not a restorative act; it is rather an acceptance of a sad reality.

What I think Siegel misses in his blind seething against JSF is the possibility that our dear author really wants to say something about the nature of violence and its consequences. Maybe Siegel is correct and 9/11 is something of a throw-in, but not because JSF was using it for self-aggrandizement. Dresden, 9/11, Hiroshima and any other catastrophic event in our recent history wherein man has devastated man so thoroughly is, for JSF, simply that: catastrophic. And not simply due to the lives that are lost, but also for those who survive to bear the burden of what such an event can possibly mean to humanity.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'm completely wrong and Siegel is correct: bad writers shouldn't get to write about important things. Unfortunately, he never really elaborates on this point. Instead he tries to put JSF in his place as a small writer using a cultural wound to “invest gravitas,” a mission which ultimately limits his review to an indictment on the state of publishing and the inability of writers to “get” 9/11. Siegel never tells us what he thinks JSF should have done to make his book socially appropriate and enable it in some way to approach the horror of 9/11with proper respect.

Supposedly 9/11 was a defining moment in American history where we all banded together and demonstrated just what it means to be a citizen. Pretty much everyone joined as one to show that even in the darkest of situations, before the direst of threats, we can prove through our compassion just how important it is to be human. Everyone, no matter who they were or what they were able to do—write, pray, cry, dig—assisted in the collective recovery from an attack born of hatred. This recovery cannot help but be long lasting and ongoing.

And here we come to my own beef with Siegel—not that you, my gentle reader, haven't already picked up on it. It's not because Siegel hates JSF that I so strongly despise this review. And it's not because I loved Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (now there's something I should have come up with an abbreviation for). I don’t despise this review because I feel that my generation is under attack from some wanker who thinks we're all in it for the money. I despise it because Siegel never once gave this book a chance. For someone who likes to condemn the self-absorbed and the creation of a “hall of mirrors reflecting nothing but” an author’s own mind, he really could use a mirror himself.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is not a perfect book. And, yes, JSF uses quite a few techniques made famous by other writers who probably used said devices to much better effect (Sebald's picture usage certainly would fall into the latter category). Nonetheless, should a responsible critic bother reading a book when he or she is determined to hate it? If a critic approaches literature with a predetermined judgment of its quality, is he or she qualified to write a critique? Siegel, in wondering aloud why JSF would publish such books, knew the answers to all of his questions and only posed them as an excuse for a protracted attack-as-essay.

After stating that the number of outlets for original fiction has been severely decreased over the past few years, Siegel claims that “young authors [are left] with just one chance to write that great book before they get dropped.” So a writer pretty much has to be immediately stellar to stand a chance...or just really, really willing to write and write and write without hoping for reward except maybe, just maybe, way down the line. Following this logic, JSF would write about the big events in the hopes of getting picked up. Blaming him for the wide acclaim he has received is not only stupid, it's childish. If he's really been rewarded for writing a bad book, even money says it’s happened before and will happen again. Although an author’s work may have failed in some manner, the author doesn’t necessarily lack ambition. Nor is he necessarily writing for all the wrong reasons. It just means you don't like it.

Reviewers and critics exist in a gray area that is in constant need of definition and re-definition. Volumes have been written about the relative import (or lack thereof) of the reviewer's craft and what makes good criticism. For my part, I think critics ought to lay out what they like early on so that readers have some idea of what they are getting into. Mr. Siegel's references to Sebald, Borges, Auster, and Calvino as writers whose devices and ideas JSF has “sampled” in the construction of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close do not necessarily sound like praise (and don't get me started on the shot Siegel takes at Jay-Z).

For all I, as the reader, know, Siegel hates what these writers have done and, beyond JSF's use of their techniques, our dear author is guilty simply by associating with such hacks. I would really like to think that is not the case but, like I said earlier, Siegel comes across as “Angry Homer” and we all know what a small amount of clarity to expect from everyone's favorite four-fingered man when he's copecetic, let alone when blindly pounding on cars.

As he wraps up his screed, Siegel extends his criticism to all writers, bemoaning their failure to offer proper respect to the 9/11. He claims that writers can’t help but reduce the tragedy by narrowing it down to fit into their own frame of experience, and deplores the failing of his fellow scribes to move beyond their own limitations.

All of this brings to mind the infamous post-9/11 issue of The New Yorker, in which author after author reduced the attack to the horizon of their writerliness, epitomized by Adam Gopnick's comparing the smell to smoked mozzarella. I was at Ground Zero, so didn't hear about the issue for weeks or read it for months (or smell mozzarella at all), but I understood both why such words were vile and how writers curled into what they know.

And here I thought JSF was the only one who would use such an event to invest his words with a sense of gravitas.