February 04, 2011

All great American literature has at its root the failure of the father

Interesting post on the quest-to-get-to-know-the-missing-father theme in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Brock Clarke's Exley, and King Dork.

I'd never heard of the Exley book before, but its basis for the paternal investigation is a startling and possibly quite brilliant one: the father in question is a fan of Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, so the protagonist sets out find the author and understand his work as a window into his inscrutable father's soul. If you've read the book, you'll know what a wild notion that is, and it certainly would seem to "out-meta" King Dork's CEH Library conceit by several layers of meta-ness. Seems worth a look.

And if you haven't read A Fan's Notes, you really should.

Posted by Dr. Frank at February 4, 2011 09:50 PM | TrackBack