Jonathan Safran Foer's constant use of innovative representations of ideas have gained him kind words from critics, but have also earned him a bit of an unpleasant reputation. He has been described as: “insufferable, pretentious jerk,” someone who is “hardly inventive”, or a writer who’s part of the “McSweeney’s generation” (a loosely-used term describing the kind of literature published by McSweeney’s, a Dave Eggers-founded publisher that experiments with unconventional processes in writing, using tools like graphs, tables, sketches, typography, etc).

His most recent book, Tree of Codes, is not likely to put an end to this; in fact, it could be said that it is not a book at all.