MixedThe AtlanticOskar sounds like a sweet preschooler and a pompous college student at the same time—which is to say that he never seems human for a moment. Though eager to impress us with the lad's imagination, Foer can think of nothing better than to offer page after page of whimsical ideas for innovations … The remarkable thing is that a substantial part of the book is designed to be only glanced at. If this is a new trend in ‘alternative’ fiction, I would like to see it encouraged … After a while the gimmickry starts to remind one of a clown frantically yanking toys out of his sack: a fatal image. This book may occasion talk of sophomore jinxes, but if anything, Extremely Loud is a bolder and more historically significant novel than its predecessor.
Johnathan Franzen
PanThe AtlanticThe language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen … If Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. The apparent logic is that the novel can lure Americans away from their media and entertainment buffet only by becoming more ‘social,’ broader in scope, more up-to-date in focus … The prologue raises expectations for a socially engaged, or at least social, narrative that are left unmet. Too much of it takes place in high school, college, or suburbia; how odd that a kind of fiction allegedly made necessary by America’s unique vitality always returns to the places that change the least.
Denis Johnson
PanThe AtlanticTree of Smoke starts off with one Seaman Bill Houston shooting a tiny monkey he sees in the jungle. (The symbolism of this happening hours after JFK’s assassination is crude in more ways than one.) … Anyone expecting a psychological novel from characters so lacking in complexity deserves to be disappointed … As for the action, it never feels authentic … Johnson has no sense of style, of which words are right for a given context. This in turn makes it difficult to figure out whose point of view we are dealing with … Johnson cannot comprehend the spiritual dimension of people’s lives, a dimension that, as the adage about foxholes reminds us, takes on more and not less importance during a war. In Tree of Smoke, religious faith is just a plot device to set off clichéd 'arcs' of guilt, self-abuse, and redemption.
Chad Harbach
PanThe AtlanticWhile [Keith] Gessen is wrong about its being ‘impossible to dislike,’ it’s not terrible either. The vaunted first pages are well done, with an undeniable flair for sportswriting...One reason this opener works so well is that the prodigy is seen by an observer, from a distance. Unfortunately, the young man ceases to be an enigma even before the page numbers get into double digits … Harbach seems content keeping us just this side of seriousness, so that reading his novel through is like submitting to a long and almost imperceptibly light tickling … People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness. But The Art of Fielding falls short of this new standard too.