And there is the critical mass claiming never to have read anything like it. Here he is, diligently weaving a tapestry of other people's stories, styles, ideas and imagery. Safran Foer (who is clearly a well-read, intelligent and sensitive writer) must have wondered what the hell was going on. The question of originality is the most striking. Time after time the same sentiments and words and adjectives crop up – and time after time, as far as I can see, they bear little relation to the poor book. This hymn-sheet-singing is – as just about every broadsheet critic of the book would express it – "extraordinary". It's "dazzlingly imaginative", "marvellously inventive", "intensely inventive". It isn't just original, it's "of startling originality" (that from both Jay McInerey and Nicci Gerard writing separately in the Observer). This flood of adjectives reaches its spate in the reviewers' attempts to convey just how fresh and new the book is. My Penguin edition comes with page after page of orgasmic appreciation: a tidal wave of "impressive", "smart", "wildly exuberant", "wonderful", "extraordinarily brilliant", "extraordinarily moving", "achingly heartbreaking", "shocking", "linguistically brilliant", "rambunctious tour de force of inventive intelligent storytelling". Few debuts have been so fulsomely praised as Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated.
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