The book that EL&IC reminds me of from the list of books we have read for Disaster Fiction is White Noise. It has the same informal tone and wording, and it is humorous and lacking a conventional structure of a novel. When I first started reading this book, it brought back echoes of another novel I had read in one of my other classes a while back. That novel was written by Dave Eggers and called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I therefore went around snooping on the search engine we all know and love, Google. Google led me to the semi reliable source of Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, I found out that indeed, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are not only good friends, but also collaborate on projects from time to time.
While Foer’s humorous tone and informal style of writing reminded me of Egger’s work, there is a major difference between the two authors. I do not recall random blank pages, pages with just a word or a sentence, photographs, or pages with colored writing in Egger’s work. This alteration of the convention of a typical novel gives this work an original and diverse taste. While I will admit, these things occurring after pages of text was distracting and a bit chaotic, it also made the work interesting to me because it was something new to me. Also, I have to admit, it was nice to keep turning those pages and fulfilll the reading requirements for class, and not having to read as much text as we’ve had to read in previous novels!
The constant change of perspective in this book reminded me of Lucifer’s Hammer because that was the one book where perspectives were constantly changing from person to person. It made the book hard to follow, and the changing of perspectives in this novel had a similar effect. Despite the fact the novel was intriguing, the constant perspective changes were a bit irritating. Yet Foer managed to have a very creative and interesting approach to a touchy subject and disaster, and I am interested in seeing how he brings everything together to conclude the novel. The humorous tone of this novel was a nice change after the monotonous and depressing tone of The Road.