A Book A Week: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Houghton Mifflin 2005 (library copy).

This book was like a heartbreaking puzzlebox. The layers of discovery unfolded in clever and tangled ways. No one ever suggests that nine-year-old Oskar Schell is autistic, but his overdeveloped precocity does remind me of the autistic Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (which I was reading to the Sonars when I read this one).

Oskar is a boy in New York whose father died in the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. Oskar’s grief is manifest in his emotional outbursts and his tendency to self-harm when he’s very upset. Oskar and his father played complicated word games together, and one of their favorite activities was to find mistakes in the New York Times. So when Oskar finds a key in his father’s closet, Oskar is certain that his father has left him one more puzzle to solve. A child’s idealism and single-mindedness, doused in sadness and guilt and misunderstanding for what he perceives to be an unforgivable secret about the day his father died, mix together as Oskar sets out on the seemingly impossible task to find the lock into which the key fits.

What unfolds are two main stories, separated in time by decades, but connected by Oskar. The story of Oskar’s search for his father’s puzzle (and his father), and the story of Oskar’s grandparents and their unlikely (and equally grief-doused) love affair and breakup after World War II.

The improbably complicated story leads Oskar on a journey that has moments of deep emotion and illuminating cleverness. At other moments, though, that plotting sleight-of-hand feels overly contrived. The book is a stunning piece of collective emotional processing though, employing interesting typography, and progressive images that become symbolic in their repetition. Foer points to some of the lies we have told ourselves as a country in the wake of 9/11, and the ways in which grief can twist our thinking, both individually and collectively. At the end, I found the book uplifting and hopeful, not as cloying as some critics found it. I am susceptible to sentimentality at times, of course. I appreciated that Foer builds a case for our interdependence and interconnectedness in this world by allowing Oskar to build an unlikely network of friends and allies who find strength in one another.

Comments

[Sarah]

Finally, you review a book I've actually read! :) I loved this book too.

[Eglentyne]

There are SO MANY books! We must read all the books. All the good books, anyway.