Book Review: Music for Torching - A.M. Homes

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews.

On day 9 it is A.M. Homes's wonderfully nihilistic Music for Torching.

Read: July 2007

Music for Torching in one tweet-sized chunk:
A delirious vision of suburban life gone wrong. Vitriolic, nihilistic, neurotic, it is a novel of scandalous normality, of impotence in the face of life.

Music for Torching is a huge blazing fire of a novel, consuming the vagaries of suburban family life like dry timber. Vitriolic, nihilistic, neurotic, it is a novel of scandalous normality, of impotence in the face of life. At times it reads like Revolutionary Road for the late twentieth century, there is that same trapped sense of powerlessness, that same longing for more, that same pressure to conform. I can’t remember when I was last so utterly hooked on a book within the first five pages.

Paul and Elaine’s marriage is burning out of control, they are isolated and atomised and horrified by what they have become. We first met them in a short story in The Safety of Objects when they enjoyed a hallucinogenic refrain from family pressures smoking crack while their children were away. Looking back on it in this book, they remember that as a moment of almost unimaginable happiness, as though it was the last time they felt united and whole. Now their nihilistic tendencies are tearing their household apart. In between passionless sex they bicker and nag, have affairs and wish they could make their lives good again. Their only pleasures involves dinner parties with their friends when they can bask in the impression of neighbourhood contentment.

The pressure is building, something has to give.

One night Elaine cannot face cooking. Paul offers to Barbecue. Egged on by their inanimate lives Elaine kicks over the barbecue setting the house on fire. Feeling deliciously liberated they get in the car and go for a meal with the children. But the house is not burnt to the ground, only gutted. Denied the cataclysmic freedom of total destruction Elaine and Paul can only try to rebuild, both the house and their fractured selves.

What ensues is a dark and claustrophobic journey through the frenzied minds of a couple desperately trying to recreate the image of family happiness. Cue all manor of sexual affairs, not to mention a crack team of house cleaners in space suits and the ubiquitous school hostage situation. But no matter how good and honest their intentions Paul and Elaine are never quite able to get hold of themselves, and bring everything back to how it should be. And normality is sucking them into a false sense of security.

Homes has a vibrant and to-the-point style of prose which makes her writing incredibly warm and inviting. Her characters are well conceived and brilliantly realised, flawed and infuriatingly lovable at the same time. She is concise and her vocabulary is exact; reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald in her ability to say a lot with few words. She is a very good writer and this is a very good book.

Music for Torching is a delirious technicolor vision of suburban life gone wrong. The Times review probably describes it best: “Homes doesn’t so much critique suburban American life as shoot it, stab it, chuck it in the boot of her car and drive it into a lake.” The exhilaration contained within these pages is difficult to diffuse, it is a glorious fire-cracker of a book and you are going to love it.

8.5 out of 10

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Read: November 2005

How does he do it? Fitzgerald says more in one sentence than most authors manage in a lifetime. Not only is Fitzgerald able to capture the essence of complex ideas, or detailed descriptions in a few words, but he is a master storyteller. The Great Gatsby is a novel about the trappings of fame and glamour, about the seedy underbelly of ‘swinging’ American 1920’s high life, about incompatible love and wanting. This is a society magazine, 1920’s style. There are few ‘Great’ novels which appeal universally to everyone in one way or another. This is one of them. Read it now, you will not be disappointed.

8.5 out of 10

The Discomfort Zone - Jonathan Franzen

The Discomfort Zone follows naturally from Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 bestseller The Corrections. Sure, that was fiction and this is autobiography, but many of the themes and settings of everyday life remain the same. It chronicles the author’s growth from a “small and fundamentally ridiculous person” to the confidently insecure writer he has become. He casts his scope both inwards and out, linking his own life to the socio-political history of the last fifty years. His story is both personal and universal.

It is a good read, and what we are left with is a picture of everyday life in all its fabulous banality: a life which Franzen loves and hates in alternating measure but which is an inextricable part of himself and his fiction

6 out of 10

White Noise - Don Delillo

Jack Gladney is professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-hill. His colleague, Murray, runs a seminar on car crashes. Together, they discuss modern life with cinematic scope, everything from Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Hitler to supermarkets and death. But it is 1980’s America, consumerism is in overdrive and technology sings lullabies to convince us of its protection, all the while threatening to destroy everything. And when an airborne toxic event hits the town, the very present reality of death becomes startlingly obvious. It is a false alarm, but that doesn’t make it any less shocking. And as they Jack and his wife, Babette, try and get their lives back on track, they begin to reveal their deepest fear – which of them will die first. Soon they are going to extreme lengths to cheat death, to escape that great inevitable which looms large and totally empty and eternal. So used to life being filled with waves and currents and white noise, the void of emptiness that is death terrifies them.

This is an astonishingly powerful, yet tender and funny novel in which Delillo turns his characteristically sparse style to the questions which rack all of us on those nights when we cannot sleep. There are few books which get so intimately, acerbically, surrounded by the static-like interference of modern life. In a funny and powerful manner, Delillo brings the nightmare in the closet out into the open, where we can all laugh aloud at death. Because, like the monster under the bed, it is all a whole lot less terrifying when you see it stood there, clothed in pathetic human flesh, before you.

The sanitisation of modern life, the crackle of static from the TV, bland labels in mind-numbing supermarkets, the spectre of nuclear destruction. Life, death, the universe. It is all here, in between the words, invisible as airborne particles, silent as electricity, flickering and clicking in a deafening swell of white noise all around us. If there were awards for reflecting subject matter in the style and atmosphere of a book, then White Noise would be up there with J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace to claim the very highest prize.

8 out of 10

Falling Man - Don Delillo

Read: April 2007

Falling Man opens amidst the chaos of 9/11 as Keith Neudecker stumbles dumbstruck away from the Twin Towers. He is in a daze, can barely comprehend that anything is out of the usual. He makes his way to his ex-wife’s house, to a life he knew before any of this happened. The novel follows Keith and the people around him as they struggle to understand an event that is beyond anyone’s power of comprehension.

Keith’s wife, Lianne, is still reeling from the death of her father almost twenty years before. Now she runs writing sessions for those with dementia and worries that her own mind is fading. Their child, Justin, searches the sky with binoculars for Bill Lawton (Bin Laden) who speaks in a monosyllabic language and is certain to return. Lianne’s mother and her art dealing lover Martin argue over the nature of God and jihad. And Keith himself can only begin to remember that crazy morning by meeting with a woman who was there as well.

All the while a street performer named Falling Man is performing stunts across New York, leaping from heights and hanging, frozen in the air, daring people to remember.

This is the world Don Delillo presents, a world which started long before 9/11 but whose consciousness was created in that fateful morning. If anyone should write a book about this subject then this is the man. With White Noise he expertly tackled the Cold War fear of nuclear fallout and death and now here he is tackling the modern paranoia: terrorism. He is a master of plotting the psyche of terror and this is every bit as good as White Noise. Falling Man is exactly what you wish for in a book, intelligent, witty and intensely poignant. Take this dialogue, could anyone else delineate that disbelief better?

“He said, “It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I’m standing here thinking it’s an accident.”
“Because it has to be.”
“It has to be,” he said.
“The way the camera sort of shows surprise.”
“But only the first one.”
“Only the first,” she said.
“The second plane, by the time the second plane appears,” he said, “we’re all a little older and wiser.”

Falling Man is caught in the crossfire between remembering and forgetting, it is a hazy, snapshot view of the lives that 9/11 shaped. It is written in a distorted, confused manner, with shifts in character and plot and time. This makes it difficult to follow, hard to understand, but then, nothing about the subject is easy. There are those with dementia who can’t help forgetting and the rest of the people who can’t help remembering, those stumbling out of the grey dust of 9/11 and those who are inevitably falling into the grey mist of memory loss.

This is the mirage into which Delillo watches everything merge into uncertainty. The Twin Towers emerge from a still life painting, Keith struggles to tell what is live action and what is a replay in the sport on TV, religious belief leads to disbelief and vice versa, and Keith enters the world of professional Poker playing, desperate to recreate the Friday night game he enjoyed with friends before all of this happened.

You must read this book. Don Delillo has mapped the psychological fallout of 9/11 more superbly than I imagined possible.

7.5 out of 10

American Psycho - Brett Easton Ellis

Read: March 2006

You know, I didn’t really enjoy American Psycho. There is nothing I find less rewarding than novels which supposedly get inside the mind of a maniac. They are usually contrite and dull, the plot leading inextricably towards some cataclysmic ending which has been predictable from page one.

But there is something about American Psycho that sets it apart from its contemporaries. In the two and a half years since I read American Psycho it has steadily grown in my estimation. Partly this is because it is crammed with incredibly funny satire. In some strange way it is like Red Dwarf in the deft manner it slices through 1980’s culture. And while Red Dwarf targets the Perrier drinkers of the middle classes, for Brett Easton Ellis it is those obsessed with Les Miserables. I cannot think about or hear the musical without laughing quietly – and sometimes not so quietly – to myself. Patrick Bateman, you see, is obsessed with Les Miserables, particularly the British Cast Recording which he rates as far superior to its American counterpart. He mentions it consistently, to the point of total ridicule.

There are so many little humorous japes scattered throughout American Psycho that it is difficult not to look on it warmly. The way Bateman can name the designer of every piece of clothing someone is wearing but not remember anyone’s actual name; the long turgid chapters in which he waxes lyrical on his favourite bands; – Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News! – his fear of visiting the video rental shop; and the geekish pride in what is now completely out-of-date audio visual technology. It is all very, very funny. All these subtle hilarities combine to create a razor-sharp farce which hacks the 1980’s yuppy culture to bits, more viciously than any of Bateman’s murderous fantasies. It is all subtly done, and in my idiocy I missed much of it as I blundered through the plot. And because of that, I really didn’t enjoy it much. But the ending is one of those endings which brings all that has preceded it into a different light. As the world Patrick Bateman dreams up around him slowly merges with the real world the impression begins to dawn on the reader that he may not be all he professes himself to be.

Despite being littered with murder, rape, insanity and police chases, Amerian Psycho is as erotic as pornography, disturbing as a walk in the woods, exciting as being stuck in a traffic jam. Reading it I was just a little bored. In his Generation X nihilism, Brett Easton Ellis is not trying to entertain, but to ridicule. For the character of Patrick Bateman is based loosely on his father, a fact which gives weight and passion to the targeted absurdity.

In hindsight American Psycho is a hilarious, subtle and intelligently characterised novel. Everything I have identified as a weakness is a deliberate plot or character device, there is nothing which has not been carefully considered. While it is not my favourite type of book, its subtlety is so carefully hidden behind a big bludgeoning battering ram than I have huge respect for its achievement. Brett Easton Ellis will never be as good a writer as his good friend Donna Tartt, but then few people are and in American Psycho, he delivers exactly what literature needs: a huge hammer blow which is both intensely cool and at the same time full of subtle substance.


6.5 out of 10

Geek Love, Katherine Dunn

Read: January 2008

A more tender-hearted novel you will not read this year. Despite its freak show characters and setting, Geek Love works because at no point is it sick, grotesque, tasteless or glibly shocking. Katherine Dunn’s talent is in making this very remarkable story feel like the most natural thing in the world. And it is. Because Geek Love is a novel about families, and individuals within families, and the crazy world which exists outside them.

Narrated by Olympia, a bald, hunchback, albino, dwarf, Geek Love tells the story of the Binewski family, and their rise to fame. And as with all great stories, it begins at the beginning, with how it all began.

“'When your mama was a geek, my dreamlets’, Papa would say, ‘she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around, hypnotised with longing.”

But Al and Lil Binewski have grander plans than circus geeking for their Binewski Fabulon circus troupe. Together they hit upon the idea of breeding their own freak show. So during each pregnancy Lil guzzles drugs and pesticides, douses herself in radiation, all in the hope of producing freaks compelling and original enough to keep the circus afloat. Giving new meaning to the term ‘nuclear family,’ Lil gives birth to 5 living children, each fantastic in their own unique way. First out comes the limbless Arturo, Aqua Boy, megalomaniac, entertainer, preacher and eventually, cult leader. He is followed by the musically talented Siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia, beautiful and alluring and each as individual as they are united. The Lizard Girl comes third, green tinted and with one tail shaped leg but she dies suddenly and mysteriously aged 2. And then there is Olympia, unremarkable, unprofitable, who sleeps under the sink. Finally comes Fortunato, almost rejected for his apparent normality, he turns out to possess strange telekinetic powers and an angelic temperament. Led by this motley crew of performers, the circus grows beyond all recognition, raking in audiences in ever greater numbers.

But as within any family there are internal tensions, people pulling in opposite directions, and Arturo will not quit until the whole family is subjected to his twisted, power-crazed ways.

With a constantly evolving plot, complex and engaging characters and easily readable style, Geek Love is a book to become thoroughly engrossed in. The characters are as fabulously drawn as any I have ever read, equal even to those in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. They each inhabit their own skin and minds completely, think independently and with the diversity of a real mind. You can almost picture their bodies in the shape of the words, living, breathing, dreaming, loving, hating. From the cold-hearted, vindictive sneer of Arturo to the loving honesty of Fortunato, the independent personalities of the twins and the unrequited love of Olympia, it is impossible not to love them all. Love them because in each of them lies that spark of recognisable complex humanity that is so rarely found in literature. Most characters in novels act as personified ideas, or plot developers. It is rare to find a family whose entire dynamic just exists, naturally and without pretence. And it is all the more remarkable since the characters in question are, physically at least, far from the norm.

The whole basis of Geek Love is the inversion of society’s view of physical perfection. Despite their external differences the Binewski children do not grow up shunted, embarrassed or gawked at. They are treasured, worshipped, made special by their different forms. Al refers to them as his ‘rose garden’ his little ‘dreamlets’. They look down upon the ‘norms,’ pity all those whose bodies are unremarkable and whose lives are so much harder because of it. Indeed, their hierarchy is based upon the scale of abnormality, a scale in which Olympia is considered the lowest and Arturo the highest form of creation.

But when a large and perpetually depressed lady in the audience professes the wish to be “just like” Arturo, a cult is born. The philosophy behind it all is brilliantly thought out, often profound, and ultimately fascinating. In Arturism, Katherine Dunn offers an original solution to the existential emptiness of human life. By hacking away at their own limbs, those devoted Arturans seek some form of almost subhuman innocence. They seek to escape the pain of humanity through exterior abnormality, with Arturo as their example and leader. Others hope to enhance their minds by disfiguring their bodies. But as Arturo slowly gains complete dominance over the family and the circus, Olympia hatches a plan to create something for herself, something not even Arturo can control.

Geek Love doesn’t warn against judging character by its outside shape and skin. It is not as simple as that. Rather it gets under that skin, into the life and mindset of its characters, rejecting the very notion of physical normality. Dunn conceives of every character trait and reaction to life possible, and because they are all ultimately more human than any of us, their story is one everyone can relate to in some way. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have each publicly stated they would like to make a movie version of Geek Love so read it now, before it becomes literatures worst kept secret.


8.5 out of 10

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers

Read: January 2006

Not only does A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius have one of the best titles of any book ever written, but it contains one of the most enthralling passages I have ever read. It comes hot on the heels of a long passage in which their mother has just died after a long battle with cancer and Dave has become guardian of his younger brother. They are driving in the hills of California and it hits you suddenly, out of nowhere, the power of being young. From the bleak, disquieting atmosphere of one page, Eggers suddenly explodes into the most excitement-strewn, pulsing with energy, passage on youth I have read.

“Please look. Cam you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above us, in, say, a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car hurtles, low to the ground, straining on the slow upward trajectory but still at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless, sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1. Look at us, goddammit, the two of us slingshotted from the back side of the moon, greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed.”

It continues like this for pages, an unending passionate celebration of life. It reminded me of early Bob Dylan, its complete belief in life and youth, the very invincible rejection of age, or death, or suffering of any kind. And simply for this passage this is a book everyone should read.

A Heartbreaking Work is ceaselessly creative and always passionate, alive and a staggering. It will certainly break your heart: “I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know.” And is it genius? Maybe. It is without doubt one of the most inventive books you will ever read.


7 out of 10

Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

Read: January 2008

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being


Any novel which takes its title and central concept from a Milan Kundera novel has a lot to live up to. And sometimes, in this startlingly original and diverse debut novel Jonathan Safran Foer exceeds even an optimistic readers wildest dreams. Such is the dexterity and invention of his writing that one gets the impression there are no challenges to which he couldn’t rise: Everything is Illuminated is absolutely fantastic.

I barely remember the last time I savoured every word of an entire novel. From the hilarious opening pages in which Alex introduces himself in his uniquely translated English – “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.” – to the inevitable conclusion to their “very rigid search,” this is a novel which will draw you in, strip everything from you and leave you ravished and wanting, pleading for, more.

The plot is multifarious in the extreme but essentially follows a character named Jonathan Safran Foer as he arrives in Ukraine to investigate his family history. He hires a local tour agency and sets off in search of the village of Trachimbrod and the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazi’s fifty years before. Accompanied by his translator, Alex – America obsessed and who speaks English as though he has swallowed a thesaurus but never heard anyone actually speak it, - his ‘blind’ grandfather, and their ‘seeing-eye bitch’ Sammy Davis Jnr, Jnr, their journey into the heart of rural Ukraine takes them into the past, a past hidden from view by fifty years of concerted and deliberate forgetting. You could say this is a novel about the holocaust, but in reality it is not. Like Art Spiegleman’s exquisite graphic novel, Maus, it is about how the past effects the present, and how we are defined by the ways in which we remember and deal with the horrors of the past.

There are three concurrent plot lines, woven together, each illuminating and offering commentary on the others. First we have the actual journey, recounted in his beautifully mangled English by Alex, hilarious, shot through with his own peculiarly profound descriptions and eye for the heart of the matter. Then there is Jonathan’s family history novel of Trachimbrod, brilliantly imagined, full of bizarre magical realist twists, religious writings and intense, slightly otherworldly characters. Finally there are Alex’s letters to Jonathan, now back in America, commenting upon each of their novels, offering oversight to the work as a whole and a pleasing post-script to the main action of the plot.

But do not be put off by this confusing summary; it all makes more sense when you are reading it. Brought together by the authors amazing ability to hold multiple themes in the air and bring them together seamlessly, it is a beautifully written, hilarious and moving novel which will illuminate the reading of anyone who chooses to pick it up.

The oft used criticism for Everything is Illuminated is that the author is being too clever: that his invention and wit and conceptual scope are the results of a smart-alec show-off, the kind of intellectual posturing which fiction can do without. But when on earth did being clever become such a faux pas? There is nothing more commendable than an author willing to experiment with their writing, to reach for the stars and try and say as much in as meaningful a way as possible. Perhaps it is because the prose is so eminently readable that his intellect conflicts with some. Because it is when the simple meets the profound that this novel really illuminates the room. I read much of this in the bath and frequently wanted to jump up, suddenly enlivened with a phrase or idea, and shout ‘eureka!’ For suddenly the world was that little bit clearer. There are some beautiful phrases, beautiful in how they relate to the themes of the novel, the characters and the plot. They are not easily recreated because they do not exist in and of themselves, but are made great by the novel in its entirety, every single word and phrase eventually draws together, circular and profound. From the slow evolution of Alex’s language to the subtle fissions forming along the fault lines of history, Everything is Illuminated replicates itself throughout. The tone fits the events, the characters evolutionary arc delineates the emotional heart of the novel, the humour makes possible the tragedy. The relation between humour and tragedy is a close and fascinating one, with each used to shed light on, to illuminate, the other. For not only does humour make it manageable to glance at the tragedies of the holocaust but those self same tragedies demonstrate just how hollow and fragile the humour can be. Nothing is set in stone, ideas evolve and develop with the intense experience of the characters, and the reader is invited along for the duration. For example, early on, in his letters Alex writes:

“I know that you asked me not to alter the mistakes because they sound humorous, and humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story, but I think I will alter them.”

Then, later in the novel, Jonathan offers the other interpretation:

“I used to think that humour was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is…but now I think it’s the opposite. Humour is a way of shrinking from that wonderful world”

Because what begins as a very funny, witty and irreverent novel is slowly overtaken by a gloomy appreciation of history and they are transformed in ways that can never be reversed.

“‘There is time for all of them,’ I told him, because remember where we are in our story, Jonathan. We still thought we possessed time.”

And in a sense this is the point of the novel. As each of the characters takes up their pen to try to shed light upon the experiences of the past, it is the process of writing which makes them stare right into the past, to understand their life through the process of viewing it. As Alex says: “With writing, we have second chances.” And echoed in history comes the repeated phrase from Trachimbrod, “We are writing, we are writing, we are writing.” Conserving the past so as to live in the present.

One thing Everything is Illuminated cannot be accused of is understatement. Very little is left to the imagination of the reader, or to speak for itself without having its purpose comprehensively enunciated. But, though this usually annoys me, here the vast, brash, luridly grandiose intentions of the author come shining through. It is a novel that could only be written by a young writer, vast and iridescently, fearlessly, inventive, it left me wondering when I would read a novel as good again. I have spent the last week flicking through the pages, desperately trying to assimilate it all, reminding myself of an event here, a phrase there. Perhaps I will even read the book again, immediately, afraid to forget a single detail.

For in a novel which is all about memory, the one thing I can say for certain is that I shall not forget it in a hurry. As Alex sums up at the culmination of the excellent movie adaptation:

“I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out.”


10 out of 10

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

Read: February 2008

9/11 changed everything for nine-year-old Oskar Schell. He went to school in the morning only to return home soon after, alone, to discover his father's last messages from the World Trade Centre on the answerphone. And then nothing. He never saw his father again. Unsurprinsingly, he has ‘heavy boots’ all the time now. He is scared of tall buildings, the subway, men with beards, and boats. He doesn’t want to get over the event, and refuses to let his mother get over it either. He gives himself little bruises to punish himself for his fathers absence. Then Oskar finds a strange key hidden inside an envelope in a blue vase in his father’s wardrobe and begins a quest to discover which of New Yorks 162 million locks it opens. His only clue is the word ‘Black’ written on the envelope he found the key in. Oskar’s quest takes him across the whole of New York, into the lives of strangers who guide him along the way, and bit by bit he begins to uncover a family mystery that stretches back more than fifty years.

Interlocking with this story there are secondary narratives, alternate plots which slowly tie together to build an overall picture of Oskar’s family. These narratives follow the lives of Oskar’s paternal grandparents who, having survived the Dresdon bombings in 1944, try to rebuild their life in America. In a series of letters their story is told, full of unspoken love and unspoken need and unspoken events which never could have happened. Except they did. And like a movie composed of short films, these three stories converge around themes and places, by saying so little they convey so much.

But there is a problem. Jonathan Safran Foer’s second outing is frought with every problem that gives rise to the phrase ‘difficult second novel.’ Where his debut, Everything is Illuminated, seemed at times to invent a whole new method of writing the novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tries to rehash it, to reproduce what has already been successful. You have the same disrupted, scrapbook narrative, similar characters in search of historical truth who discover something about themselves in the process of investigation of the past, disfigured language which conveys so much in such an unusual manner.

As with Everything is Illuminated, it is written with multiple viewpoints, crisscrossing and overlapping and eventually tying into each other in unpredictable ways. However, unlike Everything is Illuminated, I did not feel that the secondary stories here lived up to the main plot. Foer seems to be trying too hard to create something original, to make it all as quirky as possible. But for about half the book I was unsure which of their letters were written by who, and who they were written to. The periods were confusing, did not engross me in the novel. I was always waiting to return to Oskar's quest. And although the parallels that these passages were trying to make are integral to the novel as a whole – the cataclysmic impact of a destructive event, the way it changes you forever, the power of love to survive in some shape or form no matter what – their story itself did not hold my attention in the way that Oskar’s did.

And you know the biggest problem with this book? It is that it is still pretty damn good. A whole lot better than most books published. With a vast array of characters and different narratives, Foer has perhaps created the first multimedia novel. It is almost as though you step into the novel itself: through a series of photos you see the things Oskar sees, there are blank pages, pages with just a few words on, pages when the writing grows so small with so much to fit in and so little space that it begins to overlap itself. At the end Oskar even creates a flipbook mirage of time flowing backwards, an inversion of Lyle Owerko's shot of the Falling Man, falling up from the street, back into the safety of the building. In that way, he says, “we would have been safe.”

The spectrum of the catastrophe of 9/11 looms large throughout, but it is not necessarily a book about that cataclysmic morning. At no point does it deal with the politics or wider issues of the event but focuses rather on the effect it has had on delightful young Oskar. It is a book about family history and the Second World War, about one child’s refusal to let the memory of his dead father die within him.

The characterisation is absolutely first class. Oskar is a thoroughly likeable young man for whom the reader develops an almost familial bond with: you want to protect him, and make his world better again. His constant need to give himself little bruises, to invent things that will make the world better, his overwhelming sadness, the tenderness he shows to those he meets, it is all heartbreakingly sad. He is also very funny, charming and full of little titbits of interesting information. He takes pictures of things he sees to stick in a scrapbook called ‘Things That Happened To Me.’ He even carries a calling card with him:

“Oskar Schell
Inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur entomologist, francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist, percussionist, amateur astronomer, computer consultant, amateur archeologist, collector of: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memoirabilia, semiprecious stones, and other things.”

Similarly in his 103 year-old-neighbour Mr. Black, Foer creates a character who seems almost the personification of the twentieth century with his career as a war correspondent, rolodex of famous figures reduced to one word descriptions - ‘husband,’ ‘son,’ ‘money,’ or, most often, ‘war’ – and conflict between career and home life.

Then there are Oskar’s parents, the absent presences who haunt the book. His mother, who appears only briefly, sometimes neglectful, sometimes like a great masterminding schemer. And you never get a chance to know who she is. She exists in the words of other characters, has no voice of her own, no life away from what the other characters see. She is the unwitnessed victim of 9/11, the widowed spouse, unable to get on with her life. She is fascinating because we never know her, she is a blank canvas, could be almost anything in the world and the reader would have no idea.

And finally, last but not least, Thomas Schell – both the father and the son. It is nice to see a positive portrayal of a father in literature. Too much media seems to present fathers as always out at work, or uncommunicative, or boring. It is such a pleasure to read about the adventures of the father and his son, his creativity and inspiration, his caring and nurturing. And I loved the story of the Sixth Borough. It is when Safran Foer steps into this sort of fantastical fable that he is at his most intriguing, he has the story telling capabilities of Salman Rushdie and the inventiveness of a Russell Hoban.

Foer certainly has a way with words. He is a great communicator, consummately able to convey exactly what he is trying to say. There is one great moment of description, one moment I loved, so exact is the image it creates.

“It was silent and still and I couldn’t see my own hands in the darkness. One hundred planes flew overhead, massive heavy planes, pushing through the night like one hundred whales through water.”

The passage comes just as Dresden is about to be flattened during World War 2, and Oskar’s grandfather is trying to find his childhood sweetheart. That image of bombs as huge whales, the sky as thick as an oily, sluggish sea. Somehow that seems to sum up the entire novel: the huge truth of it all emerging from something almost invisible, until it is there in your face, extremely loud incredibly close, and there is nothing you can do to escape it.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close confirms Jonathan Safran Foer as a prodigious talent, as a writer who can make you laugh, cry and think in the same sentence and who is not afraid to push the boundaries of narrative to create something fascinatingly original. His multimedia approach to story-telling makes the book come alive in a way few novels do, and being able to see exactly what Oskar sees allows the reader to step into his mind in a very intimate way. Already Foer has a style which is all his own. I will excitedly look forward to the publication of his third book with an air of expectancy reserved for very few select authors. I just hope that he does not try to write the same book for the rest of his career.

8 out of 10

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

Read: February 2008

Oscar is a fat, Sci-Fi fanatic, Dominican immigrant living in New Jersey. Spends his days writing epic space opera novels, playing RPG’s, and reading comic books. Couldn’t get a girlfriend if his life depended upon it. And Oscar is a hapless romantic, a “passionate enamorao who [falls] in love easily and deeply.” And repeatedly. Unrequitedly.

And when you are born a fat nerd into a Dominican immigrant family whose community image basis itself on “Atomic Level G” pulling powers, a macho culture where sex is a status symbol, it all combines to make life rather difficult. "You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of colour in a contemporary US ghetto."

Then one night at college Oscar goes to a party dressed as Doctor Who. Oh dear Oscar. He looks like a “fat homo Oscar Wilde” – Wilde pronounced in a Dominican accent becomes Wao and a nickname is born. “And the tragedy? After a couple of weeks dude started answering to it.” Dude had his own superhero identity, just without the powers. Or the respect. Or the women.

And when you have all these problems the last thing you need is a family curse looming over you. But such is the family lot. Ever since Oscar’s grandfather made a drunken joke about the Domincan dictator Trujillo, the family have careered from catastrophe to catastrophe. They are burdened with a first rate fukú – “It is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since” – and it shows no sign of skipping a generation. With occasional appearances from a golden eyed mongoose and a man with no face, the Cabral family, and Oscar in particular, fight against the fukú with all their might, try to pretend it doesn’t exist, that their fate is not already determined. But it is all to no avail. “No matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.” And now it has its grips on Oscar and it seems that there is nothing he can do to get his life back.

So while the narrative travels back into the family history of the Cabral’s, two questions hang over poor, lovable Oscar Wao: how will his brief wondrous life come to an end? And will he will ever fulfil his hearts desire and finally get his end away?

In a family epic to end all family epics, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao traces the Cabral family through the ages. From Oscar and his loving runaway sister Lola, through their beautiful, wasted mother Beli and their grandfather, Abelard, who brought the fukú of Trujillo upon the family. It is a tale which encompasses both the turbulent history of the Dominican Republic, and the experience of the immigrant Diaspora. In the epigraph Diaz quotes Derek Walcott on the experience of immigration: “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” And this is perhaps the crux of the book. Through the Cabral’s we tour a distilled version of Dominican history over the past 50 years: from the draconian dictatorship of ‘El Jeffe’ Trujillo – “Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor” – to the everyday of its people. The Cabral’s are nobody’s, emigrants from their homeland, seekers of the better life abroad. But they are also representative of the nation, perhaps, in their struggles and joys, their adventures and outlooks, there diaspora. For this is, above all else, about the immigrant experience. About the insidiousness of the ‘other,’ the experience of being different.

Junot Diaz’s use of polyglot language is fantastic. He combines as much Dominican slang and dialect as you could possibly fit into an English language novel with the sort of sci-fi references usually reserved for Games Workshop on a Saturday afternoon. It is an immigrant nerd novel set amid a macho Latino community whose love of sex is so completely unfulfilled in its hero. Rarely do you read a novel and know you will not read another like it this year. Already voted by Time Magazine and the New York Magazine as the best book of 2007 it has been greeted with the same rapturous praise this side of the Atlantic. And you can see why. The prose is faultless: fast paced, insightful, concise, and with a touch of the wondrous to boot. Junot Diaz unquestionably has a very bright future.

Eleven years in the writing, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is worth the wait. It is both a mature and well planned novel and a stylish, contemporary soaked, romp through cultures you would never have imagined could mix. Anyone who can read will find something to enjoy in this writing. Junot Diaz has a created a book with something special in it, perhaps you could call it the Wao factor.


8 out of 10