I couldn't get past the first paragraph. Pompous ass-h.

Also, I love Brooklyn. It's one of my most favorite places to visit. so there!

What a whiny piece of crap that article is.

Seconded. Also, Brooklyn? As the center of anything? I think that is called "it would be Manhattan except hey guess what we're not millionaires."

And if it were Manhattan, nobody would say boo to a goose about it.

If I woke up a millionaire tomorrow, I wouldn't move to Manhattan. My lottery fantasies all involve Cobble Hill brownstones.

Also, a couple of (I can only assume wilful) misreadings. From Everything is Illuminated:

Despite the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Jews from this specific location and millions more throughout Eastern Europe, she survives, not merely as an individual, but as a repository of an entire history. Trachimbrod lives.

Yeah, and it's a crazy little old lady, and she gives the protagonist a box, and the box is stolen before he ever finds out what's inside. If Trachimbrod lives, it's not for very much longer, and its meaningfulness is disappearing.

From Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:

It ends with a flip book of what appear to be photographs that bring a fuzzy figure of a human being who has jumped from the doomed World Trade Center back toward the top of the page. It was all a bad dream.

Aside from the part where the essayist appears to misunderstand the fact that it's a dual narrative, and appears to forget that one of the narrators is a child, he can't differentiate between "dream" and fantasy, which is what the child-narrator has been doing throughout the book. The difference is, by the end of the book, Oskar is clear on the fact that it's a fantasy, and nothing he can do will bring back his dad. They open up the empty coffin, and because they can't bury a body, they bury the papers instead.

The hell of it is, I didn't like either of those books! I find Foer contrived and vaguely cloying. I couldn't even get through Dave Eggers (though I've read his short stories), so I can't even comment about what might be wrong with the analysis of that work. And yet, although I disliked Foer's novels, I can still tell what the point was, and neither of them is about tender, redemptive hoodoo in the manner that this essayist insists. (I'm convinced that they're about tender, redemptive hoodoo in a totally different way, but that's just a worse knock on the analysis, picking wrongheaded examples from texts where better examples are available!)

but beneath the sarcasm lays real disdain

And oh my total god, the essayist is illiterate, too!!

Oh, whew, I wasn't the only one not into the first The Dark is Rising book. I was just meh on it. Maybe I'll also try the second one.

I just finished The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright, which was really great, if totally sad [link] Dare Wright wrote and provided photography for the Lonely Doll books [link] which if I remember correctly came out originally in the late 50s/early 60s. I saw the Lonely Doll book at a comic shop and fell immediately in love with it as it is both cute and creepy, my absolute favorite combination. I then went on Amazon looking for others in the series and found the biography on Dare Wright. The user comments were really intriguing so I picked up the bio. Poor Dare had quite a traumatic, sad, and, yes, lonely life. Really interesting read and very well-written.

I have read and loved the hell out of A Heartbreaking Work, and the essayist is just as full of willful misunderstanding of that one as all the others. My reading was that Eggers was damn well aware of his own drama-queeniness and the operatic OTTness of his experiences as co-orphan quasi-parent to Toph.

He spent the entire book wrestling with just how down-to-the-marrow shitty, universe-wrecking the death of one's parents is; how terrifying it is to be responsible for a child when you're not quite done being one yourself; how scary it is to be hit with tidal waves of parental love and delight years before you're ready; how going through all that does make you feel decades older than your peers - and how, if you're a college-educated member of the snarky ironic hipster generation, you can't help rolling your eyes and gagging at your own operatic suffering even as you're succumbing to it, but what the hell other language can you use to describe it? And there you go, being ridiculous again. You can't get away from and can't bear the earnestness and the sap, and you can't find the language to convey any of it without becoming even more ridiculous to yourself. All the snippets the essayist picked to mock were, IIRC, more severely sneering toward himself than anyone else.

Not to mention that all but a small portion of the memoir takes place in San Francisco -- however, it does start in Brooklyn, and heaven forfend any post-post-postmodern literary essayist should miss a chance to piss all over Eggers and McSweeney's.

But really, this bit of praise tells me all I need to know about what sort of literature the essayist truly values:

Moreover, Lethem doesn’t pull punches. On the second page of The Fortress of Solitude, a kitten is accidentally killed while the protagonist’s mother smokes cigarettes.

Oooh! How daring and raw and ripe with unhealed trauma and rooted in gritty Brooklyn reality! I love Lethem to bits too, but those two sentences caused me to practically auto-deoculate with the @@ing.

My reading was that Eggers was damn well aware of his own drama-queeniness and the operatic OTTness of his experiences as co-orphan quasi-parent to Toph.

Uh oh. I love Heartbreaking Work, but I'm going to have trouble ever reading it again without thinking his brother is TOOOOOOOPH.

I agree one zillion percent with jz.

I agree one zillion percent with jz.

Awww! ::dances around the office::

Fortress of Solitude rocked my socks, but "You're making my side look stupid. Get off my side." No, wait. Noo Yawk: "Get off my side, you fucking fuck."ETA: That was to Essay Man, not JZ.