PositiveThe Austin ChronicleJonathan Safran Foer's fictionalized account of his particular roots quest, in the boondocks of the Ukraine, for the shtetl from which his grandfather barely escaped the Nazi killing machine in 1941, uses both the folkish idiom of Scholem Aleichem and the surreal layering of Bruno Schulz to convey the comedy of return … The Alex bits rely heavily on the humor of Alex's mangled, thesaurus-enriched English...I can't help but laugh at passages like this … The coincidence that joins Jonathan's family to Alex's is disappointingly melodramatic. The emergence of a plain-speaking Alex at the end of the novel is a disappointment. But, really, this is a wonderful debut.
George Saunders
RaveThe Austin ChronicleLike Flannery O'Connor and Nathanael West, Saunders knows that you can mine the banal for humor. The darkest and most deviant (and, let's face it, most pathetic) plots of the greedy human heart are hatched on the 'Look, it's Andre' level, which is where they are also usually crossed ... There are six stories in this collection. Four of them are very good, and the other two are at least good — a success average that is highly unusual for a short-story collection ...Saunders stories are on such a high level is close to miraculous ... the harmonic structure of my sonic response to this book would be imaged, by the sound spectrogram, as an evenly spaced stack of short horizontal lines, with a fundamental frequency of about 260 hertz. In other words, I laughed my ass off.
