Wyatt Mason

Originally published 2 June 2005

Like Beavers

“And yet, once you get past some sloppy stage-setting and the unlikeliness of Oskar’s quest (which, it turns out, was less a matter of improbability than, in a storytelling miscue, Foer’s withholding too much for too long) the novel earns your trust. Whereas Everything Is Illuminated grows more ponderous and preposterous, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close improves and deepens. The imaginative terrain it rests on, and to which Foer is staking a maturing claim, is a place where fact can make room for fiction, and fiction accommodate fact. Coming out of a period during which our horrors have become ‘unimaginable’, Foer’s imagining of Oskar’s wish, to which the novel movingly builds, is a reminder that fiction, unlike life, finds a value in wishes that don’t come true.” [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography