Bloodless Coup

We'll have to agree to disagree on everything except the part about ELIC not measuring up to EIL. I almost put ELIC down after thirty-five pages, because at that point I felt the book was hopelessly contrived, cheap, and dissevered from anything resembling verisimilitude.

The schtick was just interesting enough, and my pile of books to read just unappealing enough, that I plugged on and slowly settled into the faltering rhythms of the story. I never stopped thinking that Oskar was one of the most ostentatiously unconvincing characters I've encountered in fiction in a very long time, but I started to enjoy the older characters more. That kept me reading.

To be clear, I'm not one of those readers who think 9-11 is off limits, and it's one of those things authors can't really avoid. I don't think J.S. Foer was trying to explore 9-11 directly, and I don't think that he had an obligation to, having played the tragedy card, as some people seem to think. I don't believe in silent grieving in art; the best time is now, and while the better stuff might come with more perspective, I think it's appropriate to start exploring these things now.

But honestly, I think the book would have been equally mediocre if Oskar's father had died in a rush hour car accident. While 9-11 might have informed the deeper psychological issues to some extent, it was in some sense mere window dressing.

And the reason I can sustain both of those propositions is because I think there was a serious shortage of deeper psycholigical issues, something that I also though was true of EIL but there it worked, as that novel felt to me more tongue in cheek.

This one tried to be serious. And failed. Badly. I would just as soon not have read it. And I was pretty disappointed; my expectations were fairly high.

I should add, however, that the last few pages were pretty neat. I won't spoil them for other readers by describing them, but I have a suspicion that the whole novel was built around that conceit. That the last paragraph might well have been written, and almost certainly was imagined, long before the rest happened. Deceptively clever (one of those devices that is very simple in execution, but very sophisticated in concetion) and very affecting, but too little too late.

I think you are almost surely right about the last paragraph and the last few pages.

If the whole book were about Oskar, I'd likely agree with you (that part is certainly maudlin contrived and ... well I could add a host of unfornate modifiers). But the more I think about it, the more I realize what I find rather interesting about the novel is the part about his grandmother, and the renter, and Dresden. Sadly, what Foer produces there doesn't really meet the ambition of the project (and in terms of Dresden - doesn't even come close). But I think he was dealing with some really interesting things there, and even if he doesn't really pull it off adequately, I respect his ambition and the attempt.

Though, yeah, Oskar leaves a lot to be desired.

And I will note, again, as I did in the post - if you haven't read Everything Is Illuminated, don't you DARE pick up Extremely Loud first. [Unless you are a masochist without good taste.] Everything Is Illuminated is a vastly superior book (so good that I'm really living in fear of the film ruining it for people).