A Simple Solution to an Impossible Problem
Within only a few minutes New York City became the target of the largest terrorist attack on American Soil ever. The first few breaths of the 21st century hastily became frenzied gasps; September 11th will forever be printed in history books as a date to never forget. America’s response was nostalgic cries for normalcy and emotional pleas for peace characterized by nationalistic pride and a thirst for vengeful justice. Responding to not only a traumatic event, but a recent traumatic event, is a dangerous realm for a writer to dwell in. By entering this hot category, the floodgates for ruthless analysis from critics and peers are opened and have the potential to quickly extinguish all of the writer’s merit—it is equivalent throwing yourself into a fiery furnace and asking not to be burned. The emotional fresh wounds combined with the mass confusion and philosophical questioning of arbitrary pain is a difficult picture to paint for even the most talented wordsmiths. It is the ultimate war between author and hermeneutics.
While the most experienced of scholars and well-versed writers were silent for years subsequent to 9-11, Jonathan Safran Foer practically prances right into the muck of things. Ready and rearing to attack such difficult human complexity using only a nine-year-old protagonist and some flashy typography as his feeble offense. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close closes in on the post-traumatic stress catalyzed by 9-11 with a confidence, for lack of better words, only an ‘oxymoron’ could uphold--that oxymoron—being a naïve genius. Yet before taking away all of his merit as a scholastic author, Foer’s boldness of prose and plot is inexplicably very successfully. Foer narrates through a motor mouth nine year old, Oskar, to voice simple answers to the densities of human nature. He maps out the complex journey towards achieving (and feeling) normalcy after a tragic event.
Foer transforms and rejuvenates the common and exhausted motif of “love before it’s too late”. He dresses up stale sentimentality with unconventional, flashy typography and photographs of doorknobs, elephants, and the back of peoples’ heads that surprisingly gives the reader a new introspection on life. Foer paints character abstractions, plot oddities and impractical absurdities comparable to the imagination of Andy Warhol with the vocabulary of Kurt Vonnegut. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has the potential of dismaying stiff traditional novelists. Fundamental writers who love the intricate prose of Fitzgerald and Steinbeck will be left confused and disappointed by the erratic and post-modern style of this Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. However, Foer has created a completely new style of organizing information in a novel that is uniquely caters to the “Information Age” generations’ attention span. He combines cryptic numeral patterns, black and white photos, colored doodles and differing prose that grab and subsequently enslave the readers’ eyes to the pages and hearts to the story. It’s a constant game of decoding and untangling a plot that can only be solved when practicality is set aside and imagination takes the helm. When we divorce ourselves from our rationality, embrace our pathos and humble ourselves from the pedestal that our college diplomas have set us on, our minds are freed to find our inner-Oskar. Trust in Oskar’s neuroticism and Foer will give you the option to end with teary eyes and “lighter boots”.
Oskar, a nine-year old New York native, transforms a numbing, horrific event into fanciful, light-hearted adventure. Two years after his father was murdered from the September 11th attacks, Oskar finds a key stowed away in his father’s room that is paired mysteriously with a slip of paper with “Black” written on it. This discovery catalyzes the most absurd interactions between Oskar and numerous Blacks in the different boroughs of New York City. These minor characters unknowingly shed light on how to cope with tragedy that leaves every reader with a feast of food for thought.
The narration of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is broken down into a limited child-like understanding with the prose eloquence of a scholar. Oskar’s eccentricity makes it difficult to ground and humanize his character, which has the potential of crippling the plots realism; however, regardless of Oskar’s snarky-ness, he embodies a vulnerable truth. He gives life to the taboo yet universal emotional state of bewilderment and absolute abandonment that death leaves us with. He speaks of things he doesn’t understand, invents things that don’t exist and disorients himself from reality because that is what pain, fear and grief provoke. Foer’s choice of narration through Oskar gives certain freedom to express pain and confusion that would come across unnatural and unacceptable in an adult.
Oskar, with all his fanciful characteristics successfully encompasses the chaos of sorting through the emotions after a massive tragedy and in turn transforming it into bite sized, reader-friendly, digestible pieces. Foer expounds humanities struggle with grief in dangerously simplistic terms. He dresses up his prose with fancy typography, cryptic messages and elaborate text. Foer’s fantastical flights of tangential (sometimes utterly amusing and sometimes utterly pointless) thoughts through Oskar create an abstract complexity that a narrator chained by the heaviness of adult reasoning could not illustrate. Without Oskar’s old soul curiosity and naïve courage to ask the dubious, this novel would ultimately fall short in its depth of exploration in human nature and would limit Foer’s commentary to flat and exhausted motifs. Ultimately, Foer narration successfully validates irrational fears that plague us as children and haunt us as adults.
Oskar is an inconsolable youngster. He is introspective, pompously blind and easily frustrated with an imagination so boundless in spectrum and an intelligence so beyond his years, that Foer has clearly created every parents worse nightmare--an underdeveloped college student trapped in a pre-pubescent boy. Oskar’s quasi-fictional qualities create loveable, quirky narrator. The reader can’t help but become enchanted by the absolute incongruous incantations and daydreams harbored in Oskar’s mind. Everything from his picture list of “Things that have happened to me” to his incessant questioning is admittedly charming. The reader is invited to take a journey that follows the groves of Oskar’s imaginative paradigm rather than the bore of reality.
The majority of the novel revolves around Oskar’s search for “Black” the owner of the lock to his father’s key. This overt symbolism takes the reader on Oskar’s journey as he searches for an emotional release and escape from his father’s relentless haunting presence. Oskar believes that if he finds this ambiguous Black character, it will unlock his Father’s lingering foothold in his life and release him from the burdening weight of 9-11. Along with Oskar’s narration are letters from his Grandparents. Each letter connects the years within Oskar’s family tree. Foer creates a heavy and off shoot parallel between 9-11 and the bombing of Dresden. This interesting comparison of tragedies seems at first slightly arbitrary and empty, however later demonstrates the dichotomy of America being both a victim and an enemy. This comparison illustrates how subjective the classifications of “good and bad” can be.
Foer clearly finds comfort in dressing up dense thoughtfulness in fanciful ironies and elaborate analogies. For example Oskar’s mute grandfather that slowly lost his use/purpose of words, his grandmother’s marriage to her dead sisters lover or Mr. Black’s refusal to hear any noise for decades. Each character copes differently when faced with tragedy and Foer attempts to explicate through his series of minor characters that there is no mold for healing and that recovery is a individual, unique journey all the while leaving readers with a blatant motif, to word tritely, love before it’s too late.
After pages of capricious narration from Oskar, it’s hard to ignore Foer’s budding abuse on Oskar’s lippy nature. Foer, at points sloppily filters what appears to be his own half-finished absurdities and rash philosophies that are too juvenile and unacceptable to be voiced through anyone but a nine year old boy. As loveable as Oskar is, it’s difficult to ignore that he is a marionette controlled by Foer; in other words a “plastic bag full of oddities” rather than a fully developed character. Yet regardless of the empty character development, Oskar successfully illustrates (as the second to last chapter is titled) there is “a simple solution to an impossible problem”. Foer’s swap of Oskar’s legitimacy for a powerful kidney punch of profound simplicity was ultimately an astute choice. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close delivered a fantastic plot story, interesting array of characters producing a fatigued theme cloaked in the freshness of unconventional artistic methods.
