The end of the year makes for an interesting look back at life. It is traditionally a moment for reflection. So this month I decided to reflect on some of the books I read in 2008.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

I do not think I am exaggerating when I claim that Jonathan Safran Foer is America’s best young novelist. After his stunning debut novel, Everything is Illuminated (2002), Foer has returned with the funny, the tragic and the absurd in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Meet Oskar Schnell, a nine-year-old with above-average intelligence who’s still fairly naive about the real world. His father died a few years ago in the World Trade Center attacks, though Oskar has always hoped that his father might have survived. One day, Oskar finds a key inside a blue vase. He does not know what this key opens, only that it might lead to his father. The key has a note wrapped around it with the word “Black” written on it. Oskar is convinced that “Black” is a person’s last name and begins a search for everyone in the state of New York with the last name, Black. Along the way he meets several vivid and interesting characters, spends some time “brush[ing] up [his] Shakespeare,” as Cole Porter might have said, and writes letters to famous scientists (such as Jane Goodall and Stephen Hawking) asking if he could be their prodigy.

The two other narrators are his grandmother, a somewhat neurotic woman with a secret past, and a mysterious man he only knows as “The Renter”, who also has a mysterious past and who cannot speak. (He writes everything out on notepads and has “Yes” and “No” tattooed on his hands so he does not have to write the words so often.)

Illustrations add to the surrealism of the book. Look closely. Some are clues.

Foer has created a wonderful story of a young child who is searching for the truth. Oskar is a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Encyclopedia Brown, half Huck Finn and (oddly) half Mr. Darcy.

Foer’s text is filled with literary in-jokes and snippets of French and Spanish that run by so fast that you might not even notice them.

Having thought about the wide span of references and scatological humor, I would say that Foer owes a tremendous debt to Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce. Foer’s novel brings back memories of Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow and Kurt Vonnegut’s stories of WWII. Yet for all the humor, let us not forget the tragedy. Oskar was the last person to hear his father before he died. He is searching for anyone who can help him reclaim his father, no matter how meaningless their interaction with his father might have been. He is obsessed with his father, playing the last messages his father left on the answering machine several times.

Foer blends the tragic and the comic, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the gritty realism of life in the big city and the magical imaginings of a youngster. He has surpassed almost every other young American writer in terms of style and aesthetic achievements. He is our next literary genius.

Obliviously on He Sails and A Heckuva Job by Calvin Trillin

I discovered Calvin Trillin when I read his award-winning memoir of his late wife, About Alice (2007). From there, I thought it would be interesting to check out these two slim volumes of poetry. They’re both billed with the subtext, “The Bush Administration in Rhyme”. Both of them feature, as their cover, cartoons of the president attempting to look “presidential” with Dick Cheney standing not far behind, being his usual, grumpy self.

Everything is up for criticism, in verse, of course. It’s amazing to read these books and look back on the scandals we’ve seen from this administration; there so many, happening so fast, it’s easy to lose count. The poems take sharp jabs at everyone in the administration, in a style that somewhat resembles Mark Twain at his most political (and his most hostile).

This poem, for instance (taken from A Heckuva Job), “A Poem of Republican Populism”:

Our policies address the cares

Of heiresses and millionaires.

Our point of view reverberates

With folks who live behind high gates

And folks whose country clubs may lack

A single Jew, a single black.

We’re backed by all the CEOs.

We waive the regs that bring them woes.

To comfort them is our intent.

Yes, though we always represent

The folks that sit in corporate boxes,

The gratifying paradox is—

And this we love; it’s just the neatest—

The other party’s called elitist.”

Trillin’s poetry shows the bitter reality. The Bush administration has been one long joke from the beginning to end (though it would be a lot funnier if young people weren’t dying as a result of its incompetence.) The poems range from the laugh-out-loud hilarity to the sober series of nine stanzas that make up the second part of A Heckuva Job. Obliviously on He Sails contains a rather interesting send-up of the Gilbert and Sullivan tune “Major Generals-Song” from The Pirates of Penzance, as well as many short poems that tickle the funny-bone and boggle the mind with thoughts like, “Thank God W.’s on the way out.”

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

This delightful novel is written for children of all ages. The plot of the book is somewhat thin, yet Selznick still makes an interesting tale. For 526 pages, we follow Hugo Cabret, a young orphan boy who lives in a Paris train station, as he winds the clocks in the station—his uncle’s job. His father and mother are dead; his uncle, who is his legal guardian, has gone missing. Hugo continues his uncle’s work, growing endlessly fascinated with machines.

Machines, movies (silent-film classics) and books get a lot of play in this work. It is a great introduction into the world of silent movies for children or for anyone else who has yet to see the great Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd.

At the same time, it is also a great book about art and the way artists are viewed by the world. Brian Selznick’s wonderful illustrations capture the beauty of the tale and also add an extra depth to the work’s multi-faced structure. A wonderful book for a child or an adult.

The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger

I love J. D. Salinger. I love the mystery of him. Not just the mystery of the books, but the mystery of him, Salinger, as an individual. I do not know much about his life, but I do know his work.

I began reading Catcher in the Rye one weekend in September. Having finished with an American literature class earlier that year (and not having read Salinger) I decided to dive into some of the more (in)famous books of American literature; Catcher was always on top of my “to read” pile.

Holden Caulfield has not mellowed with age. While the supposed “shock-value” of his language has faded (I’ve heard people use more profanity at the supermarket), Salinger’s novel still retains its power as the epitome of the “teenage-angst” genre.

Nine Stories, however, offers several pieces that have not aged well. Some of the stories seem to have gotten off to a good start, only to have been shot dead when they were beginning to stand on their own two legs.

However, “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish”, “Down in the Dingy”, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut”, “Teddy” and “For Esme with Love and Squalor” still retain their ability to entertain and to shock the reader. It might be a mixed-bag of a collection, but most of Salinger’s stories are still worth noting, some fifty years later.

Indignation by Philip Roth

Philip Roth, like Holden Caulfield, does not mellow with age. At the age of 75, he is still able to write fiction that makes most people blush, while at the same time staying above the “trashy” line.

His most recent novel, Indignation, is a look at college life in the 1950’s, life in the decade between Kinsey and the Sexual Revolution of the “Swinging Sixties”. It is, indeed, quite a look both at the personal and the public lives of students at Winesburg College: the bonds that tie and the restrictions that choke.

Marcus Messner, our narrator (I won’t call him a hero), is a typical Roth-ian narrator. Fleeing from his stereotypically Jewish family (the cause of much of the novel’s comedic interludes), he goes out to Winesburg so that he may join up with the rest of the world, ie, anywhere away from his father’s kosher butcher-shop in Newark, New Jersey.

The book has several cringe-worthy moments, but there are great moments (such as when Marcus meets the college Dean) which remind me of why I love Philip Roth’s novels and why—if I may be frank—the Nobel Committee, if they must pick an American writer next year, MUST pick Philip Roth.

Betrayal by Harold Pinter

Finally, speaking of the Nobel Prize, this 1978 play by Harold Pinter remains one of my personal favorites (Editor’s note: Harold Pinter passed away in late December). The premise of the play seems pedestrian enough—a man (Jerry) meets a woman (Emma) and has an affair with her—only the plot is told backwards, ending with the two meeting. The idea was later used in a famous episode of Seinfeld (“The Betrayal” or “The Backwards Episode” as it has become known.) Featuring his usual sparse, tight dialogue and those… antagonizing… long…pauses…Betrayal is a feather in his cap.