A representative example of this critique is Steve Almond's assessment that the latter 'is ultimately a wish fantasy borne of the sorrows of 9/11. These critics question what they see as Foer's appropriation of historical trauma as an opportunistic shortcut to literary pathos (the Holocaust in Everything is Illuminated, 9/11 in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).

While some of this certainly has to do with the glowing profile pieces that routinely mention Foer's youth in close proximity to the obscene size of his advances, book contracts, and movie options, many of the critiques suggest not simple resentment at presumed unearned success, but righteous indignation toward what is seen as outright manipulation, the belief that his novels offer a veneer of sophistication masking a calculatingly soothing sentimentality at its core. While his first two novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, have met with widespread acclaim and mammoth sales, they have also encountered unusually vociferous denunciations. Taking elements from the traditions of found poetry and artists' books such as Tom Phillips' A Humument, Foer has created a sculptural text that emphasizes the print novel's status as a visual, tactile, and fundamentally material medium.įew contemporary writers have elicited as divisive a response as Foer. Tree of Codes is a novel constructed through a process of erasure, Foer using a die-cut technique to literally carve his text from the pages of Polish author Bruno Schulz's 1934 novel The Street of Crocodiles.

For here are the same lines in their proper textual form:īut even this image doesn't adequately convey the singular reading experience of Tree of Codes, because this is what a reader encounters when first opening the book: While this imagistic prose immediately signals to a reader that Tree of Codes is not a typical straightforward narrative, seeing the re-quoted text conceals the book's central experimental conceit. Children greeted each other with masks painted on their faces they smiled at each other's smiles growing in this emptiness, wanting to resemble the reflections.whole generations had fallen asleep' (8).

Jonathan Safran Foer's experimental novel-cum-book sculpture Tree of Codes begins, 'The passerby had their eyes half-closed.

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer