Volume 52, Number 14 · September 22, 2005
Horror Tour
By Keith Gessen
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Houghton Mifflin, 355 pp., $24.95
Everything Is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Perennial, 276 pp., $13.95 (paper)
A lot has changed since the age when Henry James could so easily enumerate, in his book on Hawthorne, all the things America lacked for the sustenance of a serious novelist—historic castles, to begin with, and an army, and museums. We now have castles of commerce and industry, and a grand army, and a Guggenheim Las Vegas. Yet especially in the last twenty years, even as American power increased beyond imagining, the idea became more firmly entrenched, especially in self-consciously young writers publishing first books—Bright Lights, Big City; Generation X; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—that, aside from some recreational drug use and anomie, nothing truly momentous could happen here—not 'anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight,' as Hawthorne had put it way back when. Real history was elsewhere; the United States was still, as the impeccably dressed KGB agent says to Nathan Zuckerman at the conclusion of Philip Roth's The Prague Orgy, just 'the little world around the corner.'
Review, 3704 words
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