Jonathan Saffran Foer - Master Composer

Jonathan Safran Foer, a brave young author of the new millennium, has offered us a story about an incredibly bright nine-year-old boy, Oskar, unhinged by the loss of his father in the tragedy of 9/11. In his second novel, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, Foer not only intrepidly tackles 9/11 as it relates to Oskar’s family but also successfully layers and interrelates the experiences of his paternal grandparents at the bombing of Dresden, Germany during World War II. In fact, this duel narrative is a masterful syncopation of aftermath experiences which depend on each other until the end of the tale where they coalesce into insightful personal revelations. When all comes together at the end, we witness a metamorphosis of sorts - the crawling caterpillar takes flight as a butterfly - and, while they are far from being a perfect family, they strike up a fresh, innovative beat. The new pulse, unlike Foer’s allegory of “the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like crystal chandeliers in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heart beats yet…,” relates well to what the family leaves behind.

Foer sets the rhythm of the breeze pulsing off the butterfly’s wings on page one and doesn’t stop. His word and phrase associations set the moods, tone, and a percussive dissonance that keeps his audience on their toes, or turns them away altogether. “Raisons d’etre” and “incredibly bad fart” in sentences next to each other were marvelously prophetic in terms of tone, for example. Oskar is a walking, talking paradox, as is the predicament of his grandparents. And when Foer moves to free associate his thoughts, it’s pure four-count jungle beat. Bo Diddley was known for pounding out a four beat on the drums called the “happy hardcore.” This author’s upbeat exhalations burst forth in necessary parts pulling us to our feet from our vulnerable, exposed position in the dirt with the character who hurts at the time only to dance us on to the next scene. We figuratively take a roller coaster ride with Oskar, as well as his family.

Through Oskar, Foer launches us on an absurdly complicated quest from the outset. Even with clues beating en mass through the air like a diminutive thwumping wind in the form of pictures and written images, it still took reading the entire book for me to finally unearth the treasure of the doorknobs. Foer layers these seen-through-a gauzy-reality re-enactments of two actual cataclysmic man-borne disasters with extremely loud pain and incredibly real emotion from characters that his audience invests in heart and soul. They are the walking wounded. They are the very sensitive spirits who carry the reservoirs, of which Oskar invents, available for the tears of others in their souls. When Grampa returns to Anna’s home to see what remains after the Dresden disaster, all that is left is “a patch of the façade which held the door up.” I distinctly remember the first images shown on TV after the thick dust and fine mist began to clear from the area around the grounds where the Twin Towers once stood. What remained was a piece of the façade – skeletal remains of a gargantuan building which once house the dreams of many. Scores of those people burned. For some reason, Grampa grabbed that door handle and it was so hot it took his skin off. Grampa became cataleptic after an amalgam of painful events in Dresden. This subtle layering of innuendo and abject imagery enhances the experience of reading Foer.

The balance of humor elevates the reader to a place of rest and recuperation in order to endure to the end with Oskar and his family. The young genius forms an unconventional friendship with the driver of the limo that transported Oskar, his mother and grandmother to his father’s funeral. The limo driver is willing, albeit uneasily, to listen to Oskar’s ramblings. The precocious boy carries on a fast paced conversation with the driver that contains references to inventing such things as a limo long enough to stretch from a woman’s VJ to a mausoleum. He goes on to butchers the English language, as little boys often do, in my experience. At one point he blurts out, “Well, succotash my balzac, dipshitake.” I personally spent enough of my youth reproaching my brother’s well thought out rhythmic renditions of ‘Old McDonald’ and what the farmer had on the farm after the cow moved its bowels. So many times I remember regaling him with disgust and cries of “Eeeewww, I’m gonna tell!” I had no problem relating to Oskar, the intellectual titan, as a child. His creator made him vulnerable, distractible, and forgetful as children usually are.

Grampa, totally dispossessed of earthly materials, except for unsent letters to his son, returns some time after his son’s death, dragging the baggage full of one-sided conversations along. When asked by the man who took his passport why he came, Grampa replied, “To mourn.” And then, he said, after a pause, “To try to live.” And again, we hear the reference of rhythm, only this, a discord, which could muddle even more the harmony of this family - these ‘Foer’ hurting people. While Grampa’s answer to the man might have disappointed Oskar’s grandmother, had she heard, she has shown throughout her ordeal that touch, nearness, and an occasional “I’m ok.” are enough for her to keep pace.

Oskar carries his wealth with him at all times and distributes his riches as he travails. This is a chronicle of reciprocal enrichment, sweetly and mysteriously convoluted in the telling. His father unwittingly sent him on a journey to find the right Mr. or Ms. Black for a key he found hidden in his dad’s room in a vase with the word ‘Black’ written on it. Oskar is convinced he will uncover some hidden, intimately related secret to his father’s life at the end of this treasure hunt. This determined youngster, who repeatedly decries having ‘heavy boots’, decides to take up the baton and begin his investigation of all the Blacks in the phone book. The one and only trip to visit a Black by himself is in the very building in which he lives. Here, he begins an illuminating friendship with a man over 100 years old who accompanies Oskar on his special quest. Oskar goes on to meet the Mr. and Ms. Blacks of various degrees of depth, damage, need and desire to be needed. While he shares of himself, he allows them to grant him what they have to offer. Many of them show up at a school performance where he plays the part of poor dead Yorick, only his head showing to the audience. When he spies the various Blacks seated in the audience Oskar realizes that their presence effectually “lightens his boots.”

Oskar’s mother is the beat of his heart though, at times, it seems his grandmother holds that prized position. So many times this son refers to his mother, or doing something for her, as his raison d’etre, his reason to exist. There is discord with his mother, but in Oskar’s eyes that syncope lays in the precipitous beat of another man’s heart taking the place of his dad in his mother’s life.

I refer to Foer as brave, and intrepid, for one reason, because of his response to the force of criticism that has been thrown his way. For instance, John Updike reviewed this book in the New Yorker (March 14, 2005), and blasted Foer’s protagonist whose “family consists of a dog called Buckminster, an unusually permissive and remote working mother, a loving grandmother who lives across the street and talks to him through a baby monitor, and a grandfather whom the trauma of the Dresden fire bombing has robbed of the gift of speech…” as having “few accultured antibodies to heal the wounds of his father’s abrupt death.” I have to wonder, first of all, if he paid attention while he read the book, because his truths are helter-skelter. Apparently he didn’t catch the allusions regarding the fact that Oskar’s mom orchestrated his trips around the city, on the sly. Secondly, I am concerned that Mr. Updike was bother by the notion of a prepubescent child that is unaccustomed to dealing with death. He actually insinuates that Oskar would have, in ‘normal’ situations, learned vicariously through the past trials of his family to deal in a ‘healthier’ manner with the death of his father. I challenge Updike to look up the word ‘empathy’ in the dictionary and then practice the concept.

Harry Seigel, in his review “Extremely Cloying & Incredibly False” in the New York Press, refers to a scene where Oskar’s grandmother and her sister Anna lay in bed at night and share a kiss. His perception of the passage made me wonder if he had actually read the book. He wrote, “Foer seems to have a soft spot for incest. At one point, the grandmother recalls lying in bed with her sister in their youth. The two of them kissing, with tongue…Sister’s kissing, young children walking city streets unaccompanied; it’s a wonderful life for worldly naifs.” Never once do we read that the sisters share tongue or does Oskar walk the night unaccompanied. My naiveté has been exposed, I suspect. I expected such an accusatory tone to emanate from actual fact. Never-the-less, in his interview with Robert Birnbaum, Foer in the Morning News, stated, “… rejection is integral to the publishing process and is no indication of quality.” which is a statement consistent with the patterns set forth in this book.

Whatever happens, no matter how it interrupts the cadence of life or of the pattern of our breathing, we simply must breath. The lesson I learn from Oskar, is to breath according to my own tempo, allowing for occasional dissonance. Indeed, I contend there can be something gained in the planning of an occasional rough ride, if only to quicken the rhythm of the pulse. Grandma’s lesson, I do so appreciate, since I am closer to her age. I am more determined to learn to be content in a world that, at times, really sucks!