Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005), 326pp. 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the kind of book I read for—the kind that I’m excited to pick up, hate to put down, and saddened when it's over. The film version (apparently the worst-reviewed movie ever to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, but more about that later) was released last winter, so I don't think I'm giving too much away by revealing that the book follows Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy whose father died in the World Trade Center attacks, on his mission to find the lock that fits a mysterious key he found in his father's closet.

Let's talk about Oskar. American literature has a long tradition of memorable child/adolescent narrators—Huckleberry Finn, Scout Finch, Holden Caulfield—and Oskar is right up there. Oskar is exceptionally precocious, a lover of French and admirer of Stephen Hawking, whom he repeatedly writes requesting to become his protégé. Most reviewers agree that Oskar has some kind of developmental disorder along the autism/Asperger's spectrum, but the book only hints at this. He also shows signs of obsessive compulsive tendencies, especially a tendency to fixate on unpleasant thoughts, like whether the body falling from the World Trade Center in a picture he keeps in his notebook is his father's. But more than anything, Oskar impresses the reader as charming and sensitive, a dynamic personality that Safran Foer manages to make believably sophisticated without losing the naïveté and idealism of childhood.

There's little doubt in my mind that Oskar's narration makes the book. Certainly it (the book, that is) has lots of other stuff going for it—an engaging plot, complexly rendered characters across the board, and a really interesting utilization of visual elements like pictures and typeface, which reproduce items that exist in the world of the story (including Oskar's "Stuff that Happened to Me" notebook) in the book itself. But what makes the book touching rather than just technically adroit is Safran Foer's virtuoso crafting of Oskar's voice and perspective.

That, and also this: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is best known at a 9/11 novel—an ambitious enough theme in itself—but its scope is even larger than that. Safran Foer's meditation on 9/11 and its aftermath is deepened by its juxtaposition with the bombing of Dresden and its aftermath, brought into the story via a subplot involving Oskar's paternal grandparents, whose letters are interpolated throughout Oskar's narration. Through the exploration of these two events and their interconnections, the book takes on questions of 1) how and to what extent we can access, contain, or transmit the experience of trauma through language and 2) whether and to what extent an attempt at this might have the power to heal us.

As I mentioned, the 2011 film is reportedly the worst-reviewed Oscar nominee to date, with a solidly rotten 47% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But that is not the reason I didn't see it. I am often a fan of cinematic adaptations of books I like (I'm already beside myself with anticipation for Baz Luhrman's remake of The Great Gatsby, one of my very favorite books of all time), but for me, part of what Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is "about" is the role of writing as a way of reclaiming or connecting with painful experiences that could never otherwise be given voice in our everyday lives. So I happen to think this story reached the apotheosis of its telling in novelistic form; I just don't think it could be done as well through the cinematographer's lens.

I would love to say more about why Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is such a beautiful and sad and fantastic book, but I would only end up copying it word for word in its entirety. So in order to save your eyes and myself from copyright infringement, I'm just going to recommend that you pick it up for yourself.