Book Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
by Pat Scharfe
Are we too close to September 11 to discuss, write about, or contemplate it? That may seem like a strange question, but many thought so when they first came across Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I can imagine their concern. It is an easy target for callow, pandering writers, and we all heard the few terrible “memorial songs” that unfortunately became radio fixtures soon after the event. But the last thing one should want to do is to discourage real writers and intellectuals from talking about the tragedy. Foer, with his blend of humor and lyricism, is well prepared to engage just such a literary discussion. He burst onto the scene in 2002 with his debut novel, Everything is Illuminated, the story of a young Jewish American who travels to the Ukraine to find a woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The story is written partly from the point of view of the American’s Ukrainian translator, who gloriously mangles the English language. Foer has shown great interest and capacity for exploring tragedy with humor and compassion.
Foer approaches the tragedy without an explicit political bent. The story is narrated from the point of view of a nine-year-old prodigy named Oskar Schell, (whose father died in the World Trade Center) and two of his grandparents. The experience of his grandparents in the firebombing of Dresden by Allied bombers near the end of World War II forms a counterpoint to the tragedy in Manhattan and certainly heads off any fear of jingoism in the novel. Foer sees the September 11 attack as yet another instance of human folly and barbarism, like Dresden and Hiroshima. He concerns himself with the question of how ordinary people, disconnected from political struggles, cope with these forces beyond their control.
The character of Oskar Schell has been criticized for being unrealistic, but that is beside the point. Oskar is unrealistic because he’s much more interesting than a normal nine-year-old. Moreover, while his range of cultural knowledge is unrealistically large, the emotions feel genuine. Oskar has a business card that terms him an “inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur Entomologist, Francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist” and more. He is continually inventing to soothe his childish emotions. Oskar invents subway turnstiles that detect radiation, guns that won’t fire if they detect anger and skyscrapers with moving parts that can open up to let planes fly through. Through this range of interests, he makes his feelings about the world concrete in a way that would be unavailable to the ordinary nine-year-old.
Oskar’s grandparents form an elegantly wistful balance to the boy’s hilarious enthusiasms. His grandfather Thomas stopped speaking shortly after bombers, presumably American, killed his family and pregnant lover in two short bursts of bombings and flames. Thomas communicates only by writing and sums up his predicament when customs in New York asks him what he will be doing in the United States: “to mourn,” he writes, and “to mourn try to live”. Thomas’s writing shows him fighting a losing battle to make sense of his experience, while writing itself is insufficient.
Ultimately, the problem is not that Foer tries to heal a wound too fresh, but rather that he does not engage it sufficiently. The novel ends by emphasizing the simplistic theme that, in the end, everyone loses everyone, and that we’d all like to go back to a time before tragedy and regret. It is done in a way that may be moving, but there is just not much depth to what he has to say on the whole. The real value of the novel lies with the writing along the way, which is lyrical and absorbing. The minor characters Oskar encounters, too, are true originals. Oskar meets scores of Mr. and Ms. Blacks that he seeks throughout New York City, on a quest to find the exact lock meant for the key labeled “Black” by Oskar’s late father.
In a way, Foer may implicitly have assented to the idea that it’s too early to make sense of September 11, because he does address it in any direct way. He only to expresses it alongside the remembrance of past tragedies. His readers are fortunate he finds so much humor and artistic virtuosity along the way.
Are we too close to September 11 to discuss, write about, or contemplate it? That may seem like a strange question, but many thought so when they first came across Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I can imagine their concern. It is an easy target for callow, pandering writers, and we all heard the few terrible “memorial songs” that unfortunately became radio fixtures soon after the event. But the last thing one should want to do is to discourage real writers and intellectuals from talking about the tragedy. Foer, with his blend of humor and lyricism, is well prepared to engage just such a literary discussion. He burst onto the scene in 2002 with his debut novel, Everything is Illuminated, the story of a young Jewish American who travels to the Ukraine to find a woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The story is written partly from the point of view of the American’s Ukrainian translator, who gloriously mangles the English language. Foer has shown great interest and capacity for exploring tragedy with humor and compassion.
Foer approaches the tragedy without an explicit political bent. The story is narrated from the point of view of a nine-year-old prodigy named Oskar Schell, (whose father died in the World Trade Center) and two of his grandparents. The experience of his grandparents in the firebombing of Dresden by Allied bombers near the end of World War II forms a counterpoint to the tragedy in Manhattan and certainly heads off any fear of jingoism in the novel. Foer sees the September 11 attack as yet another instance of human folly and barbarism, like Dresden and Hiroshima. He concerns himself with the question of how ordinary people, disconnected from political struggles, cope with these forces beyond their control.
The character of Oskar Schell has been criticized for being unrealistic, but that is beside the point. Oskar is unrealistic because he’s much more interesting than a normal nine-year-old. Moreover, while his range of cultural knowledge is unrealistically large, the emotions feel genuine. Oskar has a business card that terms him an “inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur Entomologist, Francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist” and more. He is continually inventing to soothe his childish emotions. Oskar invents subway turnstiles that detect radiation, guns that won’t fire if they detect anger and skyscrapers with moving parts that can open up to let planes fly through. Through this range of interests, he makes his feelings about the world concrete in a way that would be unavailable to the ordinary nine-year-old.
Oskar’s grandparents form an elegantly wistful balance to the boy’s hilarious enthusiasms. His grandfather Thomas stopped speaking shortly after bombers, presumably American, killed his family and pregnant lover in two short bursts of bombings and flames. Thomas communicates only by writing and sums up his predicament when customs in New York asks him what he will be doing in the United States: “to mourn,” he writes, and “to mourn try to live”. Thomas’s writing shows him fighting a losing battle to make sense of his experience, while writing itself is insufficient.
Ultimately, the problem is not that Foer tries to heal a wound too fresh, but rather that he does not engage it sufficiently. The novel ends by emphasizing the simplistic theme that, in the end, everyone loses everyone, and that we’d all like to go back to a time before tragedy and regret. It is done in a way that may be moving, but there is just not much depth to what he has to say on the whole. The real value of the novel lies with the writing along the way, which is lyrical and absorbing. The minor characters Oskar encounters, too, are true originals. Oskar meets scores of Mr. and Ms. Blacks that he seeks throughout New York City, on a quest to find the exact lock meant for the key labeled “Black” by Oskar’s late father.
In a way, Foer may implicitly have assented to the idea that it’s too early to make sense of September 11, because he does address it in any direct way. He only to expresses it alongside the remembrance of past tragedies. His readers are fortunate he finds so much humor and artistic virtuosity along the way.
posted by The Protest at 5/26/2005
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