FICTION IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 4 8 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W G R E G J O H N S O N ‘‘If it looks funny on the page, I don’t read it,’’ said Flannery O’Connor of experimental fiction. This somewhat reactionary observation is in line with her aspersions on such authors as Virginia Woolf, whom she called ‘‘nuts’’ (though admitting this was an unfair characterization); and yet according to her biographer, Brad Gooch, she did admire such modernist works as James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), masterpieces that ‘‘made it new’’ in terms of subject matter if not of literary form. Had O’Connor lived into the 1970s (she died in 1964, at age thirty-nine), it’s doubtful she would have cared for the self-reflexive fictions of John Barth, the poetic ri√s of Donald Barthelme, or any of the other myriad postmodernist works that have tested the boundaries of contemporary fictional practice. Though a staunch Roman Catholic, O’Connor in her correspondence did recommend some of the up-and-coming Jewish writers of her day, including the young Norman Mailer (whose work she called ‘‘very fine’’) and especially the relatively conventional BerH e r e I A m , by Jonathan Safran Foer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 571 pp., $28) 1 4 9 R nard Malamud. Upon first reading Malamud’s The Magic Barrel (1958), she wrote, ‘‘I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself.’’ In another letter, she amplified: ‘‘The stories deal with Jews and they are the real thing. Really spiritual and very funny. Somebody was telling me yesterday that the reason Jews are ahead of Catholics in every intellectual pursuit is very simple: they have more brains. I believe it.’’ But O’Connor could get cranky after reading books with either extreme subject matter or what she saw as too much sexual frankness . Had she survived long enough to witness the sexual revolution and to encounter such a novel as Philip Roth’s star-making Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), no doubt she would have blown a gasket. Certainly it’s fanciful to imagine her reading the highly experimental yet ethically grounded books Jonathan Safran Foer has published so far – the novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), along with the non- fiction work Eating Animals (2009) – but it seems likely that she would have appreciated Foer’s work for the same reason she did Malamud’s, even if Foer’s prose sometimes ‘‘looks funny on the page.’’ For his writing also evokes the spirituality and humor O’Connor liked in Malamud’s fiction. Foer’s obsession with Judaism , Israel, and Jewish identity are far removed from O’Connor’s abiding devotion to Catholicism, but she would no doubt have admired Foer’s interests in family tradition and religious principles , even if she did not share them. In his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Foer produced a double-stranded narrative in alternating chapters featuring a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer and his guide, Alex, who helps Foer (usually called ‘‘the hero’’) travel to Ukraine in order to find the young girl who saved his grandfather from the Nazi death camps. More serious subject matter it’s di≈cult to imagine, but the novel is also uproariously funny. For Alex is the most delightful and original mangler of the English language since Mrs. Malaprop , and he shows on almost every page that he is idiomatically challenged, to say the least: ‘‘When his train finally arrived, both of my legs were needles and nails from being an upright person for such a duration.’’ As he admits when he and Foer meet face to face, 1 5 0 J O H N S O N Y ‘‘I implore you to forgive my speaking of English. I am not so premium with it.’’ Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, displayed the kind of technical razzmatazz that O’Connor scorned, including experimental typography, blank pages, and oddly placed photographs. Yet this novel, too, was marked...