Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Houghton Mifflin. 368 pages. $34.95.

Our great authors were once the ultimate parents. Starting with the Bible and on down to the grand tradition of the realist novel, narration and knowledge have gone hand in hand. Writers such as Honore de Balzac and Jane Austen felt they understood the world and, as good fathers and mothers, considered it their duty to instruct us in its ways.

Jonathan Safran Foer might be the first great writer of our new century, and he represents the opposite notion of authorship. (more…)