Sooooo…. Lest anyone think I am a shameless cheerleader, promoting everything I read and listen to as great, I need to make some amends.  As I have stated earlier I have been lucky enough to read a LOT of good books this year.  Almost everything i picked up was well written, well paced and had excellent plots and characters.  I was really excited when Jonathan Safran Foer came out with his new book.  His prior works of fiction,  Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) were excellent and Everything Is Illuminated actually won the National Book Award.  That is a pretty fine pedigree.  His writing style tended to be pretty dense and complex and well frankly weird.  Something called “visual writing”.  If you want to find out about the style…

http://www.visualwriter.com/ScriptDr/Advanced/WhatIsVis.htm

In any case, he is cool, trendy and much loved and hated by the critics so naturally, I am interested.  The 571 pages arrived from Amazon and I started reading it.  Two weeks later I was 100 pages into it.  I have a 100 page rule.  You have to get that far into a book before you can give it up, and I did.

What I can tell you is the book is one of the most well written depressing dissertations on a very, very dysfunctional family.  The book starts with the parents being summoned to Temple for a meeting with the Rabbi because their son wrote or texted some incredibly hateful misogynistic crap and as such was not going to get his bar mitzvah.  This apparently is an existential tragedy and from there we go to through the parents shitty marriage of betrayal and unhappiness and then explore the kids seemingly sociopathic nature.  We hadn't even gotten to his siblings yet and all I thought was… what a dark, shitty, unhappy family.  Even grandpa was a judgy know it all.

I couldn't take it anymore.  There was no apparent payoff.  If one of you makes it through the next 471 pages… let me know.  If you want to borrow my copy, let me know but for once I say….don’t read this...unless you want to stick a gun in your mouth.