Second Thoughts

I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close recently, and I have been reading reviews that call it a sentimental--or worse, manipulative--attempt at addressing 9/11 and other tragedy. The novel sugests that we can benefit from some innocence that a child narrator brings to our perspective, which through its disarming honesty and precociousness (which marks any portrayal of childhood in fiction, it seems), allows us to feel better about the world, as a child does. The greatest danger in writing about childhood is sentimentalism, of losing a balance between sentiment and a complexity of emotion, or intense vitality.

I’ve never been quite certain when something is sentimental and when something is genuine--I don’t have a good bullshit meter, or perhaps it’s better to call it a critical impulse. I like bad art sometimes, and then I feel like I shouldn’t, and I’ve cried at movies that critics lament as trite. I feel that I’ve got to learn to teach myself, to train myself strictly, to resist sentimentalism. Why does it come easily?

"A sentimentalist," Oscar Wilde writes, "is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." All vanilla with no chocolate, frosting with no cake--when you eat too many sour patch kids and they turn saccharine in your mouth.

At least one review I read applauded Foer as being a writer willing to “risk” sentimentalism in order to address questions of truth and beauty. The reviewer seems to be suggesting that we need more sentiment in contemporary writing, but it must be true sentiment, which perhaps leads the reader to contemplating something deeper and more serious. However, too much of it and we’re in a sea of good intentions without anything complex to balance it, without a genuine reason for it to be there.

So why does Foer return--or regress--to childhood to address these great questions of truth and beauty, in a time of turmoil? I myself talked about a return to childhood in my first post, but I wasn’t using it to address tragedy, not in that scope. Childhood innocence and the like may teach us to regain a poetic imagination, but is it appropriate to make claims about large issues like 9/11? Shouldn’t we be “paying” something great for our response to these tragedies, for understanding them? Shouldn’t it not be easy? Or should we inhabit some kind of poetic imagination to understand it well? Yet there is something disturbing, on the whole, with the way Foer ends the whole thing--it’s all regression. The narrator wants to literally reverse time, and there is a little flip-book gimmick at the end of the book which takes one of the more desperate images in our recent collective visual memory and turns it into just that: a gimmick. Whether it’s powerful and justly emotive, or whether it’s manipulative and sentimental, I can’t exactly decide: the line between the two remains one I’m not comfortable drawing with confidence.