The Perspiring Writer Magazine

A native of Washington, D.C., Foer is the son of a public-relations executive and an anti-trust researcher. His mother had been born in a camp for persons displaced by the Second World War. His brother has served as an editor at the New Republic. Foer attended Princeton University, where his thesis advisor was Joyce Carol Oates and where he also studied with the novelist Russell Banks. Before achieving success as a writer, he worked briefly as a morgue assistant, a jewelry salesman, and a receptionist. He currently lives in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of the New York borough of Queens. His longtime friends include the novelist Dale Peck. 

Foer’s short fiction first appeared in such notable journals as Conjunctions and Paris Review. In 2000, he won the Zoetrope Fiction Prize. While still a student at Princeton, Foer compiled the collection A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell. Unassuming in both his private and public life, Cornell is known for his exquisitely eccentric creations, the “boxes” in which he arranged found objects and scraps of printed material to great artistic effect. Foer is responsible for most of the artistic elements of the collection’s layout. The collection was published between the magazine publication of an excerpt from his first novel and the release of the novel in hardcover. 

Everything Is Illuminated is an effort to transform a largely pointless personal quest into a meaningful fiction. Recalling the family lore about his maternal grandfather’s escape from the Nazis, Foer was greatly moved by a photo preserved by his mother, which showed his grandfather with a Ukrainian woman who was supposed to have been responsible for his survival. Seeking to find the woman and the full truth of the story, Foer traveled to the Ukraine, but after three days there, he realized that nothing would come of his poorly planned and ineptly conducted quest. He went to Prague, where over the next ten weeks he wrote the initial draft of the novel that would become Everything Is Illuminated, reimagining his trip to the Ukraine as not only a much more successful but also a much more multi-layered adventure. 

In the summer of 2001, a lengthy excerpt from the manuscript of Everything Is Illuminated was published in the New Yorker. The excerpt attracted such positive notice that Houghton Mifflin was willing to give Foer a $400,000 advance for the novel. The novel had an initial printing of 40,000 copies in hardcover when it was released in the middle of 2002, and Foer undertook a 38-city tour to promote it. 

Everything Is Illuminated earned Foer the Guardian Prize for a First Book and a National Jewish Book Award. The film rights to the novel were optioned by the actor Live Schrieber. Repeatedly described as surrealistic and compared to the paintings of Marc Chagall, Foer’s work has been described variously as a synthesis of the influences of such figures as James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie. Everything Is Illuminated has been compared to the work of S. J. Perelman because of its verbal virtuosity, its ability to move effortlessly between the profound and the silly, between deft observation and preposterous invention. Even more frequently, Foer’s work has been compared to that of Philip Roth because of its focus on Jewish-American identity, because of its combination of mordant irony and comic imagination, and because of its interest in the manifold and often mysterious ways in which the personal and the historical intersect. Foer himself has acknowledged the influences of the work of Franz Kafka, of Isaac Babel, and of Isaac Bashevis Singer. 

The novel juxtaposes the narratives of two young men. The first of these narrators is named Jonathan Safran Foer. He is determined to locate Trachimbrod, the Ukrainian shetl in which his grandfather lived until he escaped from the Nazi-led extermination during World War II. Foer also hopes to locate a Ukrainian woman named Augustine who may have been very instrumental in his grandfather’s escape. Foer’s narrative moves back and forth between the account of his quest and the history of the shetl of Trachimbrod in which his ancestors had lived for several centuries. 

The second narrator is a Ukrainian student named Alexander Perchov, who is recruited to serve as Foer’s translator and guide. Foer’s attempts to reconnect to his family’s Ukrainian roots are paralleled, sometimes very comically, in Perchov’s attempts to imagine Foer’s America, and at Foer’s request, Perchov even undertakes the physical task of locating Trachimbrod. With his own grandfather and his grandfather’s dog, “Sammy Davis Junior, Junior,” named for his grandfather’s favorite singer, Perchov moves across the Ukrainian steppe, penetrating history as well as geography. 

With large sections framed as the correspondence between Foer and Perchov, the novel blends the conventions of the epistolary novel with those of the historical novel, the family saga, and the suspense tale. 

Foer’s family history begins at the end of the eighteenth century with the death of his ancestor Trachim. While crossing the Brod River with his infant daughter, Trachim drowns, though by some miraculous circumstance his daughter manages to float to safety. The girl, who is subsequently named Brod, is put up for adoption through a village lottery, the winner of which is Yankel, a money-lender whose wife has disgraced him by running away with a civil servant.  Trachim grows up believing that she is Yankel’s daughter, although each year when the village memorializes the anniversary of Trachim’s death with a pageant, Brod regularly plays a featured role in the festivities. She develops into a strikingly attractive young woman. Although most of the villagers behave as though they have nothing but warm feelings for her, many secretly harbor some ill will toward her. 

As she is returning home after one of these pageants, Brod is raped by a sinister character named Sofiowka. Worse, when she finally gets home, she finds Yankel dead and a stranger from a neighboring village skulking around the house. She eventually marries this man and relocates with him to his village of Kolki, where he is employed in a mill. After several of his co-workers are killed in accidents at the mill, Brod becomes obsessed with the idea that her husband will also die in this manner. Her forebodings end up seeming prescient when a broken saw blade strikes him in the head while he is eating his lunch. Instead of killing him, however, the accident leaves him mentally imbalanced, with a piece of the saw blade remaining imbedded in his skull. Because she does not feel safe sleeping with him, Brod converts the room next to her bedroom into her own room, and the couple begins to speak and then to have sex through a hole in the wall between their rooms. 

Indeed, almost all of the residents of Trachimbord seem to have similarly eccentric dispositions and to live lives defined by similarly peculiar circumstances. What emerges from the chronicle of the village’s history is a community that seems to have existed as much in the folk memory as in the historical record. Paradoxically, the more that we learn about Trachimbord as a particular place, the more it emerges a microcosm of all of the other villages that fell prey to history because they had always existed in some ways outside of history. This tension between folk memory and the historical record is paralleled in the ambiguity about the distinctions between memoir and autobiographical fiction and in the emphasis on dreams, which constitute the most conspicuous recurring motif on every level of the narration. 

Foer’s narrative eventually reaches the story of his grandfather, Safran. Despite the handicap of a shriveled arm, he has become, by his late teens, notorious in the village for his sexual conquests. Ironically, the women of the village have simply been unable to resist his perceived charms, and he has been more the seduced than the seducer. Safran’s precocious coming-of-age is set against the looming threat of Nazi persecution, which the villagers certainly take seriously even if they make the fatal mistake of failing to distinguish it from the previous periods of persecution chronicled in their communal history. Thus, when the Nazis suddenly arrive in the village and summarily gun down almost its entire population, their victims are genuinely shocked by the way in which their history, as well as their lives, has been so abruptly and incontrovertibly concluded. And their shock to some degree becomes the reader’s shock. 

Foer’s and Alex’s parts of the narrative come together in their visit with an elderly woman, who might be Augustine or Augustine’s sister or someone else entirely. What is clear is that she survived being shot by the Nazis and then spent the rest of her life accumulating and preserving artifacts that evidence to the former existence of Trachimbrod and testify to the extermination of its Jewish population. This “witnessing” is accentuated by the revelation that Alex’s relatives were complicit in the Nazi atrocities against the Jews of Trachimbrod and elsewhere. 

Despite all of its eccentric and even exotic elements, Everything Is Illuminated addresses on of the major historical events of the twentieth century, the Holocaust. In his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he has provided one of the first fictional treatments of the most dramatic event of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the terrorist attacks on the towers of the World Trade Center. For his second novel, Foer reportedly received a million dollar advance. 

The initial batch of novels treating the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the towers of the World Trade Center have included French novelist Frederic Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, British novelist Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Nick McDonell’s The Third Brother, Reynolds Price’s The Good Priest’s Son, S. J. Rozan’s Absent Friends, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall. But none of these novels attracted the attention that Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close managed to generate. 

The protagonist of Foer’s novel is a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. Precociously intelligent, Oskar nonetheless has difficulty understanding many of the realities of the “adult” world that have punctured the protective naivete of his child’s perspective. Chief among these intrusions for Oskar has been his father’s death in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Tellingly, Oskar has stored in the depths of a closet the answering machine on which his father left voice-mail messages as the towers burned. Although Oskar has precociously corresponded with Stephen Hawking about his theories concerning the nature of time, Oskar cannot bear to listen to messages to which there no longer exists—and in fact never existed--any possibility of a reply.

Yet, despite his difficulties in facing the loss of his father, Oskar undertakes a quest that will eventually provide him with a context for understanding that loss. He discovers an envelope on which his father had written the word “Black.” Inside is a key. The mystery of this key provokes Oskar to try to locate the person named Black from whom his father had received the key or to whom his father had intended to give the key. In the process, Oskar undergoes a initiation into the adult world that provides him with a broader and more mature understanding of the cataclysm that incidentally claimed his father’s life. Although Oskar feels some guilt because he must lie to his increasingly protective mother about his strange excursions into the city, he begins to grasp that her adjustments to widowhood are not very helpful to his own attempts to find some emotional balance. 

In a moment of epiphany that suggests both his precocious sensibility and the gradual process of his maturation, Oskar uses his extensive knowledge of beavers as a corollary for understanding how seemingly lucid conclusions about the nature and meaning of the terrorist attacks could be based on false suppositions. Oskar notes that most people believe that beavers chew through tree trunks primarily to construct the dams that protect their dens. But he knows that beavers by necessity chew on tree trunks in order to keep their teeth at a manageable size. If the beavers did not chew on something that kept the teeth worn down, the teeth, which keep continually growing, would eventually grow so large that they would block the beaver’s mouth and prevent it from taking nourishment. 

Oskar’s story is given added dimension through his close relationship with his paternal grandmother, a German emigrant. While grieving her son’s death, she is oppressed by a resurgence of newly vivid memories of the horrors that she had witnessed much earlier in her life. For as a girl, she had somehow managed to survive the fire-bombing of Dresden. Worse, for her, her husband has long retreated into himself, into his own haunting memories of horrors, and their son’s terrible death has made him even more difficult to live with. As in Everything Is Illuminated, Foer integrates elements of the epistolary novel into this narrative. Oskar’s grandmother regularly sends him letters, and he discovers letters written by his increasingly incommunicative grandfather to Oskar’s father. 

In addition to these narrative layers, Foer has used technical experiments to suggest the ways in which his subject strains the possibilities of literary treatment. He changes fonts and font sizes, and he makes use of italics, underling, and bold-facing. He alternately expands the words to fill a page or shrinks them to increase dramatically the white space surrounding the printed text. Indeed, in some instances, the text becomes incomprehensible because he has enlarged it to the point where much of it lies, in effect, off the page. In other instances, he has reduced the text so dramatically that it becomes a sort of black hole, a blotch on the page from which no message can emerge intact. He leaves a few pages completely blank. 

Foer also inserts photographs and drawings into the text in a variety of ways and to a variety of purposes, suggesting the documentary while violating most of the conventions that typically lend credibility to the form. Paradoxically, however, Oskar’s vicarious exposure to other historical horrors, which he receives primarily through his grandmother and through an elderly neighbor, a former war correspondent who is one of the first “Blacks” whom Oskar identifies and interviews, is accented by a school lesson during which his class views a documentary film about the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. 

The novel closes with a “flip book” of a person falling from one of the Trade Center Towers, with the series of images reversed so that the person appears to be re-entering the tower. The device might seem extremely trite and incredibly hokey until one realizes that the person thus “saved” would not be passing into real safety but, instead, simply returning to the horror that had immediately preceded the precipitous descent that the towers themselves made so shortly afterwards. 

Although Foer has already gained a more public reputation for eccentricity, like Joseph Cornell he has discovered his aesthetic center by freely indulging his whimsical inclinations. To cite just one well-publicized example, Foer has acquired a sizeable collection of odd artifacts, literary and otherwise. Specifically, he has corresponded with authors, requesting that they send him the sheet of paper on which they might have written. His apartment is decorated with these empty sheets of various kinds of paper, framed with the cover letters from the authors. Indeed, Foer’s correspondence has not been confined to the literati. On his reading tours, he has provided audience members with tool kits for corresponding with him and has committed himself to maintaining this sort of more intimate connection to as many of his readers as possible. The seeming gimmick, in short, turns out to have been much more than a gimmick. Tellingly, in order to promote interest in writing, Foer has made a point of visiting high schools in every city in which he has been scheduled to read.