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Here we go again A perceptive Amazon reviewer of Foer's last book pointed out that many of the conceits of that novel were, shall we say, "borrowed" from David Grossman's See Under: Love. It appears that Foer read this and decided: "They wanna see plagiarism? I'll show them plagiarism! Real, bare-knuckled pomo plagiarism!" The result is that this book is an EVEN MORE shameless rip-off of See Under: Love than Everything Is Illuminated was, if that's possible. To add variety to the proceedings, he also chooses to rip off Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum (precocious child named Oskar who wanders through the traumas of man's inhumanity, anyone?). The point of all of this is so that the reader can say, "I laughed! I cried!" about 9/11. It's good to see that Foer is sticking to his original, successful formula of milking historical tragedy for yucks and book sales while remaining blissfully indifferent to the historical details of those tragedies: well, it's good because the emerging pattern removes any doubt that Foer has no qualms about exploiting the sympathy that naturally gravitates towards victims of tragedy to lend weight to his puerile and essentially solipsistic narrative and linguistic gymnastics. Foer is painfully inadequate to the task of grappling with the horrors amidst which we find ourselves: a close familiarity with the work of writers who patiently attend to the gritty reality and the real victims of history's traumas (Elie Wiesel, W.G. Sebald, even Kurt Vonnegut for Pete's sake) would make this clear, but the vacuous amnesia of the Eternal Media Present ensures that such familiarity is a rarity. I'm sure that deep in his heart Foer is a decent person who actually cares about the types of people his cartoonish characters are meant to represent. But this genuine decency is unfortunately marred by a number of different factors: a self-indulgent impatience with the details of history, an excessive faith in the redemptive power of his own considerable inventiveness (fueled no doubt by his success), a sensibility informed too much by bad Hollywood and not enough by good literature, a facile and predictable application of postmodern literary technique, and a public and critical establishment so starved for anything remotely serious and original in contemporary fiction that they're eager to be suckered in by shoddy pretenders to the throne. We do the greatest service to the dead and the bereaved not by overlaying or manipulating their stories with the hyperactive antics of our own imaginations, but rather by presenting those stories with patience, respect, and the kind of self-effacement that can only be the product of the highest artistry (any fool can blunder into the scene of his subjects' suffering). I have nothing against Foer exercising his hyper-charged imagination on worlds of his own creation-but when it comes THIS world that we together share, he merely adds to the din drowning out the actual voices of those lost and haunted by loss.