Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

This book by Jonathan Safran Foer was recommended to me by one of my most creative, intelligent friends. I trust her judgment when it comes to most things related to the arts, and I was once again not disappointed. Foer is the author of Everything is Illuminated, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is his second solo novel. While I haven’t read Everything is Illuminated, I’ve heard people ranting and raving about this author for years now, and so when my friend recommended Extremely Loud, I picked it up at the bookstore the next day.

Extremely Loud is the story of nine year old Oskar Schell, whose father was killed in the September 11th attacks. In spite of his young age, Oskar is a sensitive, intelligent and creative boy, who was very close with his father. The latter’s sudden, unexpected and violent death threw Oskar’s life into a spin – inconsolable, Oskar is having a very difficult time mourning his loss. He lives with his mother, who he resents for having a new “friend” in her life, Ron, and his grandmother – although she lives across the street, Oskar and her share a very strong emotional bond. We soon find out that Oskar’s grandmother – his father’s mother – was left by her husband decades earlier. The plot cleverly and seamlessly goes back and forth between Oskar’s adventures and his grandparents’ story, which gives the novel a lot of interesting depth and creates a suspenseful, mysterious atmosphere.

The plot centers on Oskar’s journey to find the lock that matches a key he finds, two years after his father’s death, in his parents’ closet. I can’t say much more about the plot without giving it away, but Oskar goes on a series of adventures in New York City, meets different, sometimes poetic, sometimes prozaic characters. The story is told with Oskar’s voice, and the nine year old narrator’s charming, touching, smart and inquisitive take on the world around him is truly a reader’s delight.

Oskar gauges his level of happiness and sadness based on the weight of his boots – so, for example, when he thinks about the way his dad died, he would say “it made my boots feel very heavy to think about this”. Oskar and his grandmother use the expression “one hundred dollars”: “I don’t feel like a hundred dollars today”, or “excuse me, can you speak up? Your telephone is not one hundred dollars”. As a reader, you can’t help but be moved by this young boy’s obvious difficulty with dealing with his father’s tragic death, and Foer does an incredible job at telling the sotry in Oskar’s voice and giving us poignant details that make the character so incredibly touching. When he’s sad or nervous, Oskar “invents” things in his head, even though he wish he didn’t; he gives himself bruises when he feels stressed or under pressure; he only wears white boots and white gloves; he has a secret book of Stuff that Happened to Me; and he misses his father in a profound and vivid way.

I can’t recommend this book enough. While the premise, with the death of this boy’s father on 09/11 in the World Trade Center can be a bit offputting, Foer pulls it off without ever treading into political or contentious territory. It’s interesting to read a story with this watershed event as the backdrop, instead of the forefront. The grandparents’ story line revolves around the Dresden bombings, offering an interesting parallel. Nonetheless, the book is really all about the difficulty of loving after having lost, of moving on after tragedy.

One of my favorite passages of the book is worth copying here – I hope you’ll find it enticing:

“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something terrible happened – like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack – an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir.

Anyway.”