Reviewing Foer

Julie Kvern
Advanced Writing/Comm.
Professor Jill Rossiter
October 4, 2008

Reviewing Foer

In literature writers can capitalize on disaster. By using these stimuli is alienation an aspect for those realistically impacted, especially when the literature in question is, although based upon real events, fictional? Instances like war, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and political injustice can be used as jumping off points for people with writers block in addition to those writers solely interested in making quick cash. Does Jonathan Safran Foer do this? Does he piggyback on the pain associated with 9/11? I would have to say yes if his book wasn't so well written. Rich with alternative layout and style as well as bursting with realistic characterization it's hard not to get attached to the novel.
Foer's latest publication Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is urgent and raw. Emotion guides the piece into a vigorous prophecy for finding a new way to live after loss. After nine year old Oskar's father is killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11 we are taken on a journey. He takes us to the homes of people named Black, to the struggles of understanding each other, and to areas of life that far exceeds a nine year olds maturity level. He is a tambourine player, a pacifist, a cat owner, a grandson, an atheist, a letter writer, an intelligent and creative young man who at times is unbelievable because of how truly gifted he is. However Foer realizes his audience, he understands the readers' desire for human traits and flaws in fictional characters. He makes Oskar real with the things he doesn't know.


The list in my head was getting incredibly long: Francis Scott Key
Fitzgerald, powdering her nose, Churchill, Mustang convertible,
Walter Cronkite, necking, the Bay of Pigs, LP, Datsun, Kent State, lard, Ayatollah Khomeini, Polaroid, apartheid, drive-in, favela, Trotsky, the Berlin Wall, Tito, Gone With the Wind, Frank Lloyd Wright, hula hoop, Technicolor, the Spanish Civil War, Grace Kelly, East Timor, slide
rule, a bunch of places in Africa whose names I tried to remember but
had already forgotten. It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me. (154)

Oskar also has tremendous pressure put upon him. He has the weight of solitary knowledge of his father's last words as he arrives home early from school, alone. The phone even rang while he was there, presenting the final opportunity for him to speak to his father before his death, and Oskar was understandably afraid. He couldn't answer. Hiding this from his family he is motivated to discover as much as possible about his father's life when he found a key belonging to someone with the last name Black. This adventure is the active driving force of the literature, pushing it forward, equaling the struggles and achievements in self-discovery.

His mother, a busy working mom and assumed lax parent was estranged from her son during most of the novel because he wasn't capable of understanding her attempts to try to move forward with her life. He also had no idea until the end that she knew about the key and the quest to find the owner. "All of a sudden I understood why, when Mom asked where I was going, and I said 'out,' she didn't ask any more questions. She didn't have to, because she knew" (291).

Oskar's grandmother appeared to be the most understanding and accepting character in the novel. Throughout the book letters written by grandma serve as a parallel guide. Her understanding of event specific to her own childhood as written to Oskar coincides with his discoveries in part. Through these letters we have adequate knowledge into her background on how her family was killed in the Dresden Fire Bombings, how her sister was impregnated and in love with a man, how that man was grandma's future husband, how they met, how he cannot talk, how they lived with Nothing places and Something places, how they tried and how Oskar's grandfather left when she was pregnant. Grandpa also has sections in the novel where he is writing to the son he never met. Through these sections we get another view at the relationship between grandma and grandpa but also a lesson. Serving as more of a metaphor than a real character in the book he is used for explaining silence and how even though it may appear to be devastating, it doesn't always mean that there is nothing. The story of grandpa and grandma connects the things that are out of everyone's control like disaster and death.

As the novel proceeds we discover the intricate details Foer inlays, his interweaving themes and character interaction is masked as early confusion. For instance may readers became confused to the mother's lack of attention to her son. To some it is mind-boggling that a nine year old would be allowed, let alone remain unharmed by the 200+ "Blacks" he planned on visiting in search of where the key fit. However as we read on we find that she wasn't as absent as first led to believe.

Also of mention is the different styles of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Foer has the tendency to write streams of consciousness where some readers get lost in the mass of it. There is also alternative textual designs of parenthetical separations, photographs, single words or phrases used as a visual for grandpa's speaking style in daybooks, numbers representing his phone conversation, red editing marks that reinforcing readers knowledge on Thomas Schell's character habits, text that runs together, and blank pages representing a life story. Do these differences take away from the text or have their originality made the work stronger? I think the latter because in this media driven world it not only keeps interest of the reader but it helps with character development and understanding.

Foer's latest work not only institutes new ways at visual comprehension but also the work, the literature in itself conquers. The characters, the story line, and the overall way the work makes the reader feel deserves recognition. Foer creates a world as complex as our own lives and as intricate and incomprehensible as our own thoughts. By appointing a child narrator, he gives us insight into our own childhood workings through Oskar's dialogues, questions, and blatantly honest explanation to the reader.