The Incredibly Close World of Oskar Schell

We all have 9/11 stories. Ask one of your co-workers or talk to one of your fellow students. They will tell you where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, and, probably, how they had to sit down and absorb the initial shock of that horrific event. This many years later, they will also tell you what has become dear to them. And, they might throw in something about “naiveté loss”.

In Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, we have one more story. The face on this 9/11 story belongs to the main character of his novel. His name is Oskar Schell and he's 9 years old. His father died in the collapse of one of the Two Towers and now this diminutive, precocious Everyman is confused and hurt. He seeks a resolution of understanding for having part of his soul torn out. He has experienced the immediate loss of a principal figure in his life. This is not Death in the prolonged, drawn-out form of a lingering illness. This is Death in a more callous form--one that cruelly provides a missed opportunity to say good-bye, a last chance at a final conversation.

The reader is drawn into Oskar's world. His world is New York City where he says the cellular matter of his father floats around in the very air. In trying to reconcile the “worst day” of his life, he admits to having “a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing falls into.” Because Oskar is carrying around so much emotional baggage (what he calls “heavy boots”), Foer slowly and meticulously draws the reader into setting aside their own baggage and, over the next 300 pages, helping Oskar with carrying his.

Foer skillfully pulls us into Oskar's world by portraying this bright and troubled hobbit on his personal Quest seeking a lock for the key he has found amongst his father's belongings. As we join Oskar on his seemingly impossible journey over an eight-month period to find the one lock that this key will open, we are drawn into a world of the Five Boroughs, a mythical Sixth Borough, and interwoven images (actual pictures) of doorknobs, locks, keys, people and places famous and not so famous, and a haunting blurred image of a person falling from a skyscraper.

While at times disconcerting, these pictures plus textural alterations, like red corrections of an unsent letter from a distant relative, help to flesh out the various story lines of the people surrounding Oskar. There is his mom adjusting to her own sorrow and her growing relationship with a friend named Ron. Oskar does not tell her about his key/lock quest because “The lock was between me and dad.” He has a grandmother living in an apartment across the street who is his constant sounding board and guardian angel, always available through the walkie-talkies they each share. There is a mysterious renter living with her who plays a large part in the story. (I wish I could tell you more, but I'm not a spoiler.)

Oskar is a people magnet. Foer has them wash over us in a continuing and varying series of human waves. They fill up Oskar's life and, like layers peeled off an onion skin, the revelations concerning them converge before us and we see further examples of pain and suffering and joy that we all experience, not just in a post 9/11 world, but in any world lacking in conscious effort or inability in expressing the heartfelt love for others.

Interestingly enough, Foer does not hit us in the solar plexus with graphic 9/11 images that we have already seen too many times (and with too much pain). He does have, however, dramatic corollaries from history: the World War II firebombing of Dresden and a fictional account of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. For this reviewer, it was one bombing too many and the redundancy lessens the impact of the Dresden event which has a major role on the people in Oskar's family.

At times, Foer's writing shines with the sparkling quality of a clear-white light through a crystal held very carefully in the reader's hand. This brings into question the concern about the need for all of the visual additions that he has included in the novel. Perhaps, like a sparse, clean-written sentence, fewer would have been better. This, however, is not a back-breaker for the reader to handle in this complex and moving story of yet one more survivor; not just a survivor of a post-9/11 trauma, but a survivor faced with the vicissitudes of an imperious and coldly uncaring world. Foer shows us that people struggling through and overcoming, slow measure by slow measure, can have the sound of many heartbeats joined together...and that can be extremely loud.