Post-modernism aimed to destroy elitism, and while it incorporated quite a bit of pop culture, it is hard to say it achieved significant popular readership. Jonathan Safran Foer, on the other hand, incorporates non-traditional texts into his Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in a way now familiar with many readers, and to support a more traditionally narrated tale. Nine year old Oskar Schell has lost his father in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. A precocious boy, he spends the novel searching for the appropriate lock for a key he finds in his father’s closet. Book reviews of the time were tentative; this hesitation is unwarranted. Close is a fantastic addition to contemporary American fiction.
With an intelligent and young narrator, reviewers refer to Oskar as Salinger-esque, but the incredible, consistent humor with which this book is written makes these associations somewhat invalid. It is not only innocence that Oskar has lost; he’s lost a parent and his only friend. Ostracized at school for his lack of knowledge of television, and for his sometimes terribly unfortunate phrasing, the interplay with his father was Oskar’s sole source of personal interaction. He’s terribly lonely now.
Reviewer W.R. Greer dislikes the pictures pasted into the novel, arguing that they serve no purpose. But it is touches like this that Foer includes to continually highlight Oscar’s innocence, and prevent him from becoming a character from a Salinger novel who would wish a departing soldier the best with the diction of a 30 year old. The pictures are sometimes moving and poignant, but by and large, they are silly – a counterpoint to some of the seriousness Oskar goes through, and a reminder that the source material springs from the mind of a 9 year old, who may post a picture in a book because he likes it, or it reminds him of something. Or if it is two turtles humping. Fans of Foer will likely hear echoes of Everything is Illuminated (in the collection, not the turtles).
Walter Kirn of the New York Times really comes down on the book for its political agenda. He writes, “This accords with what appears to be the novel's quite difficult grand ambition: to take on the most explosive subject available while showing no passion, giving no offense, adopting no point of view and venturing no sentiment more hazardous than that history is sad and brutal and wouldn't it be nicer if it weren't?” The depiction of the agony caused by atrocity is not apolitical. If Oskar were to entertain the problems of Israel and Palestine, and how it has contributed to terrorism, the words would be out of place in any 9 year olds’ brain. Foer instead includes atrocities committed both by and against Americans to argue that these acts are inexcusable for any reason.
Hiroshima is not casually “thrown into” the text, as Kirn remarks, but consistent with Foer’s message. Oskar plays a tape to his class of a Japanese woman narrating her experiences after living through the detonation of a hydrogen bomb. She is in terrible pain, and has lost her daughter in a grotesque fashion – a reminder that people were not vaporized into painless dust by the weapon, and that sorrow pervaded the land then just as it did post-9/11. It should not be lost on the reader that a family born from the suffering of Dresden now suffers the trauma of 9/11. This may not be a nationalistic denunciation of violence, but it is a rejection nevertheless, since they have been victims of both American and foreign-born terror.
Kirn, and other reviewers, equivocate about the sometimes flat, stock characters in the novel. Still, for a 9 year old to see individuals peripheral to his understanding of the world would be to give super-sensitive Oskar an unrealistic perception, and would be a flaw of the work. The characters are not completely consistent, as Laura Miller argues, but they are not jarringly inconsistent, and do not smack of obtrusive manipulation, if such a thing exists. All of the reviewers admit the closing pages are supremely powerful, as they echo not only hope for a reunion of the broken world, but also ascension of the victims of such massive violence.
In the reviews for the novel, cuteness became the catch-all problem with it. I suppose levity when discussing the events of 9/11 can be seen as threatening, and as the first book to handle the tragedy in an even remotely lightly fashion, perhaps the reviewers were afraid of potential backlash. Nevertheless, to deride Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as trite is to do a disservice to some of the simplistic emotions re-empowered by the attacks. While the work avoids the flag waving nationalism a vegetarian, atheist family might ignore, it pays tribute to the genuine, and simplistic, outpouring of emotional sympathy from all over the planet. Nevertheless, Oskar’s family’s grief is also intricate – complex emotions from a complicated time. Don’t be hesitant to get to know Oskar. When your week with him is done, you’ll miss the company.
-Alan
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