I’m late to the party on Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Despite the fact that many people have spoken highly of his writing, I’ve only ever read two of Foer’s other books—his experimental cutaway novel Tree of Codes and his nonfiction Eating Animals, and that I only read this year.
Anyway, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is great despite all odds. The novel is, in every way, implausible, and my suspension of disbelief has rarely been tested as it has been here. The novel is about Oskar Schell, a nine year old who lost his father in the September 11th attacks two years prior to the opening of the novel. He’s a precocious young boy who has a wealth of knowledge and imagination. While I don’t think we ought to be in the habit of diagnosing fictional characters, particularly without having the necessary qualifications, in this case I would speculate that Oskar seems autistic-coded, and when he finds a key in an envelope labelled Black, he goes on a quest across New York to track down what the key is for.
The premise of the book draws in the imagination. A mysterious key has an inherently intriguing quality that is hard to dismiss. When Oskar finds the envelope labelled Black, he is then extraordinarily lucky that an art store in the area has an at least two-year-old marker-testing station where his father’s writing appears and he then deduces that Black is a name. It’s implausible. Oskar then decides to track down the Blacks in New York alphabetically. How many of them are there? How likely is it that he’d find the right person? It’s implausible. During most of his adventures, he’s travelling alone across New York as a nine year old and people are receptive to talking with him. It’s implausible. Endlessly implausible.
And yet, the book is extremely touching, leading to emotional highs and lows that are beautifully constructed, despite their artificiality. (I’ll mention, briefly, my thanks to Maddy for framing the novel as ‘fantasy’ — that’s a great way of framing the logical realities of the text). I think what really carries the text is the voice of the novel, or rather voices of the novel. Oskar’s first person narration is so central to the story and so wonderfully achieved. Foer achieves a child’s voice and cadence without falling into the category of a YA novel. It is not the hopelessly naive voice people like to attribute to children, nor is it the overly emotionally intelligent narration granted to the child savant.
Running throughout the text is such profound sorrow. Oskar’s quirks and habits are endearing, and moreover the questions he asks himself (and others) wrench the heart. He engages in frequent speculation and the kinds of questions he asks to alleviate his pain are just so authentic, despite the artificial elements the book requires. There’s a nearly free-association nature of his conversations and when you latch on to the logic it feels that much more painful. Even more so, there are specific moments that are heartbreaking; for instance, Oskar has a binder called “things that happened to me” full of things that did not happen to him, but rather gruesome and grotesque images pulled off the internet. The way these moments articulate his trauma through an oblique angle are wonderful.
Oskar Schell’s sadness is not the only one that permeates the text. This is a novel that hops around between narrators: Oskar, of course, but also his grandfather, his grandmother, and a few scrapbook-esque items. Each of the other storylines resonate with the attack on the Twin Towers in various ways, whether it’s the Dresden bombings or a scrap of an interview from a Hiroshima survivor. Again, it’s implausible, but the way these stories intertwine and elevate one another is well-wrought.
Each of the stories have their own sorrows, and the specifics are already beginning to fade on me. The visceral gut-punch of some of them, though, will refuse to fade. For instance, Oskar’s grandfather’s muteness is deeply sad in its own way and yet there’s a beauty to moments of connection. In one scene, we find out that Oskar’s grandfather gave his grandmother a typewriter to write her life story. She has claimed all along that her eyes are “crummy” but proceeds to try. For months, she retreats to the other room to type her memoir. When she’s finally done, she presents it to Oskar’s grandfather. He then reveals something mortifying and depressing beyond words: he did not have an ink ribbon in the typewriter, but his wife assumed she was typing and could not confirm because of her eyesight. It’s devastating. The story is filled with those moments of beautiful sadness and sad beauty.
The presentation of the book helps to elevate these other elements, as well. In terms of influence, Foer seems to draw from Mark Z. Danielewski and W. G. Sebald. The text is arranged differently for different narrators, there are sections that are annotated, there are pages that fill up with text typed on other text on other text to the point of oblivion (O-Babelv-ion?). By contrast, Oskar’s narrative interest in photography is carried through the text with photographs inserted in between the narration. It’s similar to W. G. Sebald’s work, though the two have different intentions. In Sebald, I think the photographs are meant to resonate in more oblique ways with one another and add depth to the narration. Here, I think Foer selects images nicely but it’s a more literal approach. Despite being more straightforward, I still found the images a nice addition.
If I have a central complaint about the novel, it is not in the different formats or narration, but simply the length. Oskar goes through several Blacks before coming to the truth, as one would expect. (It would, after all, be the peak of implausibility if the Black relevant to the story was the first Black alphabetically in New York). That said, it meant that the plot was not progressing naturally per se, but rather being presented in a series of nearly-isolated vignettes. As such, maybe some of the details could have been cut for a tighter novel, but even then it’s not too bad. There’s also a beautiful short story embedded in the text about New York’s Sixth borough. Note to future me: that chapter alone would be a great section to present to a class. It has it all!
My review here appears short. Shorter than I’d imagined it would be for a book that I liked. I’ll posit a theory: the book spoke more to the heart than to the mind. I feel like because the novel was so bound up with emotion, I skirted along the surface a little more than I engaged in deep reflection, not that deep reflection is not possible for the book. Particularly in noting parallels between stories, considering the role of language across the different characters’ experiences, thinking about how trauma manifests in people, and so on, there are good reasons to spend more time with the book.
The scope of this review feels insufficient in both breadth and depth. I ought to have taken more thorough notes, but instead I’ll just add myself to the roster of people who recommend Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as a beautifully touching novel that is well-worth the time and that still feels fresh so many years after September 11th.
Happy reading—or at least happy reading in the kind of happysad beautiful sorrow kind of way.
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