Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close — Jonathan Safran Foer
Houghton Miflin
2005
Rating:


Dramatic attempts to address the emotional aftermath of September 11 have so far failed to be up to the challenge of dealing with a wound that has not yet scabbed over. There's nothing that can be done to make sense of the tragedy, so the best any writer can hope to do is console. That's just the feat that Jonathan Safran Foer accomplishes with "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," his worthy follow up to his staggering debut "Everything is Illuminated."

Though nowhere near as narratively daring or devastating as his first effort, Foer again utilizes his propensity for magic-realism, this time in the guise of precocious 9-year-old narrator Oskar Schell, a self-declared "inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler and pacifist." Oskar's father Thomas died while in a meeting at the Windows on the World the day of the World Trade Center attacks, leaving behind five phone messages that only Oskar knows about. "The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into," Oskar says. The boy attempts to plug that hole, first with physical and emotional masochism, then with a quest when he finds a key in an envelope with the name "Black" written on it. As Oskar scours New York City for the person named Black with whom the key must be connected, the story flashes back to the woeful tale of Oskar's grandfather, also named Thomas, who was so overcome with grief after the bombing of Dresden during World War II that he even eventually became mute, tattooing "Yes" and "No" on his hands and using a notebook to communicate.

Foer's knack for idiosyncrasy allows Oskar — and the reader — to reconnect with a closed off New York that, as Oskar is fond of saying, is zipped up in the sleeping bag of itself. It's through these people that consolation becomes possible. Yet Foer realizes that there are some emotions that simply can't be expressed through words, using a running motif of pictures of doorknobs, an entire passage of a confession that's blacked out from being typed over too many times because there's too much to say in too little space, blank pages and a concluding wish to make time run backward to express visually what the English language cannot grasp. As Oskar draws nearer to his father and the solution of the key, he comes closer to at last dealing with his grief, which is the most any of us can hope for.

Posted Saturday, April 16, 2005

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/book/jonathan.safran.foer/extremely.loud.incredibly.close