When Zadie Smith, Foer’s fellow instructor at New York University’s graduate creative writing program, published “NW” in 2012, after seven novelless years, NPR’s review of the book was titled “Was Zadie Smith’s Novel ‘NW’ Worth the Wait?”įoer will certainly be facing the same question from critics, and the book he’s written won’t provide an answer. (In the intervening years, Foer has published “Eating Animals,” a nonfiction treatise on vegetarianism, and “Tree of Codes,” which, somewhere between fiction and art, is a physical and literary deconstruction of Bruno Schulz’s “The Street of Crocodiles” in book form.) It’s rare for a working novelist to go so long without publishing a novel. Until September 6, when Foer releases “Here I Am,” it will still count as his most recent novel. “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” was published in 2005. The novel straddled my adolescent interests perfectly: It delved far enough into adult themes to feel simultaneously awe-inspiring and illicit, despite its young protagonist it was relatable enough, with that protagonist, to let my teenage self understand some of the tremendous grief surrounding 9/11 it was magical enough to convince me that a world in which dreadful things happened could itself be something other than inherently dreadful. I devoured “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” at age 14, then read every review of the book I could find, arguing internally with the critics when they found fault. There’s a swathe of my generation who read either “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” or Foer’s debut novel, “Everything Is Illuminated,” at some point in high school and grew up, from that point on, wanting to be a writer just like him. He signed the book, adding a hastily scrawled mountain above his name. Shyly I answered “Denver,” and we traded adorations of the Rockies.
When I made it to the signing table where he sat, he asked where I was from. I corralled two friends into going with me to hear Foer speak, then rushed to the bookstore to buy a second copy of his second novel, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” (I already had a well-treasured copy, but when I’d moved to go to school, I’d left it in my childhood bedroom.)Ĭertain details of that evening stand out to me in a flash frozen way: the sandals I was wearing the place where I sat in Graham Chapel while Foer spoke the ache in my calves as, afterward, I waited for an hour and a half to have him sign my book. I didn’t know he was speaking on my campus until the day of the event, and I reacted with a kind of seismic glee specific to small events of seemingly great meaning during that time of change. Six years ago, when I was 17 years old and a month into college at Washington University in St.
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