Book Review 1

Running head: EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE, A BOOK REVIEW

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a book review

Má rcio Padilha

Lewis-Clark State College

ENGL 305 – Rossiter

Fall/2010
 Book Review 2

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a book review

Despite having achieved commercial and critical success, Jonathan Safran Foer is a

controversial figure in modern American literature. Praised by many for his use of time

shifts, dialect writing, fanciful mock-history, dramatic prose, poetic devices and stream of

consciousness, Foer is admonished by others who view such hyperactive visuals as

distractions to his lack of substance:

“6, 9, 6, 2, 6, 3, 4, 7, 3, 5, 4, 3, 2, 5, 8, 6, 2, 6, 3, 4, 5, 5, 8, 7, 8, 8, 2, 2, 7, 7,
4, 8, 3, 3, 2, 8, 8, 4, 3, 2, 4, 7, 7, 6, 7, 8, 4, 6, 3, 3, 3, 8, 6, 3, 4, 6, 3, 6, 7, 3,
4, 6, 5, 3, 5, 7!, 6, 4, 3, 2, 2, 6, 7, 4, 2, 5, 6, 3, 8, 7, 2, 2, 6, 3, 4, 3?, 5, 7, 6, 3,
5, 8, 6, 2, 6, 3, 4, 5, 8, 7, 8, 2, 7, 7, 4, 8, 3, 9, 2, 8, 8, 4, 3, 2, 4, 7, 7, 6, 7, 8,
4, 6, 3, 3, 3, 8!...” (Foer, 2005, p. 269)

Born into a Jewish family in Washington DC, this 34-year-old Princeton graduate

started his literary career by expanding his undergraduate thesis into Everything is

Illuminated, his first novel. Telling the story of a young American Jew who journeys to

Ukraine in search of Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather's life during the Nazi

liquidation of Trachimbrod, Everything is Illuminated was deemed the work of a genius for

its writing style and plot structure, going on to earn Foer a National Jewish Book Award, a

Guardian First Book Award and becoming a motion picture by the same name.

Three years later, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Foer’s much anticipated follow-

up novel, places him right in the eye of the storm once again. Being one of the first

American works of fiction to incorporate the 9/11 New York City attacks as a pivotal theme

in its plot, Foer has polarized opinions as this is still a pit of raw emotions for many

Americans.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is primarily narrated by nine-year-old Oskar

Schell who is a self-described:

 Book Review 3

“Inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur entomologist,

Francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist, percussionist, amateur
astronomer, computer consultant, amateur archeologist, collector of:
rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles
memorabilia, semiprecious stones and other things
[CITATION Jon05 \p 99 \l 1033 ].”

Similar to Everything is Illuminated, Foer constructed Extremely Loud & Incredibly

Close from three different points of view which are not all in the same timeline, giving the

narrative unique multidimensional perspective. With Oskar's paternal grandparents as two

extra narrators, Foer incorporates the story of their childhood, courtship, marriage and

separation before the birth of Oskar's father to the plot; much of this is presented as a

series of letters addressed to Oskar or his father, Thomas:

Why I’m not where you are 5/21/63

To my unborn child: I haven’t always been silent, I used to talk and
talk and talk, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, the silence overtook me
like a cancer, it was one of my first meals in America, I tried to tell the
waiter, “The way you just handed me that knife, that reminds me of
—” but I couldn’t finish the sentence, her name wouldn’t come, I tried
again, it wouldn’t come, she was lost inside of me, how strange, I
though, how frustrating, how pathetic, how sad, I took a pen from my
pocket and I wrote “Anna” on my napkin… (Foer, 2005, p. 16)

Thomas Schell runs a family-owned jewelry business in New York City. At the World

Trade Center for a meeting, he becomes a victim of the 9/11 attacks. However, in the

interim between the first hit and the structural collapse of the Twin Towers, he calls

Oskar’s cell phone five times. Knowing his father was at the epicenter of the attacks, Oskar,

afraid to hear what his father might have to say, does not answer his phone upon

recognizing his dad’s cell phone number on the caller id. Thomas’ voice mail messages

torment Oskar throughout most of the novel:

 Book Review 4

Message two: 9:12 a.m. It’s me again. Are you there? Hello? Sorry if.
It’s getting smoky. I was hoping you would. Be. Home. I don’t know if
you’ve heard about what’s happened. But. I. Just wanted you to know
I’m OK. Everything. Is. Fine. When you get this, give Grandma a call.
Let her know that I’m OK. I’ll call again in a few minutes. Hopefully
firemen will be. Up here by then. I’ll call. (Foer, 2005, p. 69)

Oskar’s self-assertion is complex and, at times, contradictory, leaving the reader to

wonder whether the events he describes are symptomatic of posttraumatic stress

syndrome or merely the product of a child’s hyperactive imagination (Foer, 2005, pp. 1, 12,

14, 36, 38, 69, 91, 142, 160, 163, 193, 202, 234, 235, 243, 244, 250, 256, 257, 258, 288, 304,

316). The creative, and sometimes seemingly irreverent, allegory of his accounts,

nevertheless, brings about the existential qualms of a child who has admittedly started on a

path of self-injury as means to cope with the dictates of a depressive state of being: “Even

though I knew I shouldn’t, I gave myself a bruise (Foer, 2005, 37).”

Oskar's desire for more information about his father (Foer, 2005, p. 257) is

paralleled by a key he finds in an envelope that had been in a vase he accidentally knocked

over. With the word “Black” written in red on the envelope, Oskar assumes it refers to a last

name and, resolute to contact all the Blacks who live in the City, he embarks on a hunt for a

solution to the great mystery of the key's provenance. In doing so, he realizes that “life is

scarier than death” (Foer, 2005, p. 322) as he wanders in “heavy boots” (Foer, 2005, pp. 2,

35, 38, 39, 86, 104, 159, 197, 200, 240, 242, 251, 252, 302) around New York City’s five

boroughs in search of an answer.

Throughout the novel, Foer uses images as a literary technique which illustrates

ideas and themes as well as emotions and perspectives alluded to on earlier pages. As

Oskar visits a woman and sees a picture of an elephant's eye, images of the woman and

picture as they would be seen from Oskar's perspective appear on the adjacent pages. With
 Book Review 5

a different twist, Foer seems to apply the same technique to the written word. Grandma

and Grandpa’s background as survivors of the Dresden Bombings becomes analogous to

that of Oskar’s and the events which took place in New York City. With an early atypical

relationship Grandpa and Grandma play an important part in the story that is drenched in

existentialism:

“Only a few months into our marriage, we started marking off areas in
the apartment as “Nothing Places”, in which one could be assured of
complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at marked-off
zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in
which one could temporarily cease to exist, the first was in the
bedroom, by the foot of the bed, we marked it off with red tape on the
carpet, and it was just large enough to stand in, it was a good place to
disappear, we knew it was there, but we never looked at it, it worked
so well that we decided to create a Nothing Place in the living room
[…] But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in
the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow like the
memory of someone you’ve lost […] There came a point, a year or two
later, when our apartment was more Nothing than Something […] I
started to undress right in front of her, this was just a few months ago,
and she said, “Thomas! What are you doing!” I thought this was
Nothing”, covering myself with one of my day books, and she said, “It’s
Something! (Foer, 2005, pp. 109-111)”

Oskar Schell’s wild accounts will keep the reader’s interest and attention lit up

throughout in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The end? It is cathartic in so many levels

that only by reading one will understand! Despite possibly being emotionally harsh for

some, Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is superb and innovative literary whose

reading is a definite must.

 Book Review 6

Bibliography

Foer, J. S. (2005). Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.