Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

For every eccentricity that makes psychological sense-fear of public transportation or an overly clinical interest in the bombing of Hiroshima, for example-there’s another that’s just piled on. Instead, Oskar resembles nothing so much as a plastic bag crammed with oddities.

Perhaps Foer could have pulled this off if Oskar felt alive. The distance makes Foer think-incorrectly-that he can get away with whimsies like having Oskar imagine a “special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York,” collecting the tears of people who cry themselves to sleep and funneling them into the Central Park reservoir. With a child narrator like Oskar, you can finesse the problem he can’t be expected to realize his own poignancy, let alone be accused of wallowing in it. He’s drawn to pathos, but being a smart and self-conscious young writer, he’s also painfully aware of the perils of sentimentality. What attracts Foer to these tragedies isn’t so much their historical resonance as their emotional power: They opened up great, weeping maws of grief and loss.

The other strands come in the form of letters and diaries written by his paternal grandparents, middle-class Germans whose psyches were irrevocably maimed by the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945. The book’s slender plot hangs on a key Oskar finds among his father’s things and the boy’s quest to find the lock that fits it. This novel, like Everything Is Illuminated, is a braided story, with the main strand told by Oskar. It may just be too early to get cute in writing about September 11 on the other hand, there’s never a good time to get as cute as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close gets. We’re still not entirely sure what it signifies, or even if, philosophically speaking (and this is the hardest possibility to contemplate), it might signify nothing at all.

But September 11, that spectacular monstrosity plopped into the middle of an ordinary Tuesday in downtown Manhattan, is another matter. In a novel about the Holocaust, this kind of oblique, even playful, strategy worked, partly because the subject has already been so exhaustively and earnestly explored. It looks at September 11 through the eyes of Oskar Schell, a weird, precocious 9-year-old whose father died in the World Trade Center collapse. The real Foer’s second and latest novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, shows that he hasn’t lost his taste for naïve or otherwise unreliable narrators. The other half was a brilliant yet tender satire of life in postcommunist Eastern Europe told by the young guide who escorts “Foer” to the village’s ruins. Half of his celebrated debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, consisted of tiresome magic-realist yarns about a Ukrainian shtetl, written by a quasi-fictional Jonathan Safran Foer. If Jonathan Safran Foer ever tells his readers what he thinks and feels, he tells it slant.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer