A Book Review on Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The first thing every college student needs to do upon beginning classes is to make that financially painful visit to the bookstore to get their textbooks. So it happened that I found myself holding a copy of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. My first impression was “this is weird.” My mom and sister’s first comments about the book were the same as my first thought was. Just flipping through the book, one’s eyes are met with random pictures, pages with only a few words written on them, even blank pages and pages black from the layers of text upon them.

As it turns out, Foer’s novel involves several narrators, one of which is a ten-year-old boy named Oskar, a child dealing with the traumatic death of his father. We also hear from his grandfather (whose life is scarred by the past that haunts him) and his grandmother (who tries to deal with both present and past tragedies). Oskar grows up without knowing his grandfather, but has an incredibly close relationship with his grandmother. Foer’s novel includes events such as the suicide bombers’ attack on the Twin Towers and the Dresden bombing (even a brief reference to Hiroshima) that create a sinister undertone shaping and defining the characters’ personalities and actions in many ways.

On top of all of this, the novel is a cleverly crafted puzzle, providing only enough information to peak the reader’s curiosity before it teasingly moves on to the next (seemingly unrelated) piece of the puzzle. This pattern continues throughout the whole of the book, which traces Oskar’s search for the lock that matches a key he finds in his late father’s room. Ultimately, Oskar seems to be searching for a way to keep his father alive. When Oskar is trying to explain how he feels about the search for the lock, he makes the statement that “looking for it let me stay close to him [his father] for a little while longer,” and that he “didn’t want to hear about death. It was all anyone talked about, even when no one was actually talking about it” (304, 295). It is clear that Oskar is forced to understand at a very young age the absolute inevitability of death. It is also clear that he is looking for ways to cope with that understanding.

One might easily get caught up in the depressing aspects of this novel. This seems to be, to an extent, Foer’s goal. Foer provides detailed experiences of drastic and horrific events in history. He gives us a detailed description of the Dresden bombing from the point of view of someone who was in Dresden at the time. We are told, “the second raid began…there was a silver explosion, all of us tried to leave the cellar at once, dead and dying people were trampled…I ran through the streets and saw terrible things: legs and necks, I saw a woman whose blond hair and green dress were on fire, running with a silent baby in her arms…” (211) The rest of the description is just as graphic. Readers are not given a softened version of the story. We are not given impersonal statistics or an image of a Hollywood “boom.” We are given the grotesque and raw view of someone who was forced to live through the event. In this way, Foer pushes his audience to recognize the absolute lack of respect a bomb provides. The dead are not left intact, their bodies preserved. Foer’s novel does not give readers the idea that they are. In this way, Foer does not remove his readers from the horrors, the sorrow, or the terrified confusion of the bombing.

This is just one of the grief-stricken stories we are exposed to throughout the course of the novel. Foer shows his audience that being hurt can happen in a number of ways. He presents the Dresden bombing, the Nazi death camps, and the bombing of 9/11 alongside Oskar, who loses his father in 9/11 and has to learn to live with that in his everyday life, people who have lost those they love to old age or death and still hold onto the sorrow of that loss, and the grandma who lost her sister in the Dresden bombing as well as her lover to his own inability to face the life before him after all of the sorrows behind him. These are all treated with the same amount of respect. No sorrow is guffawed. In fact, many of the quieter, day to day sorrows are displayed as reactions to more “newsworthy” events. They are all equally important and Foer presents them in such a manner. In essence, Foer tells his readers that all sorrows are equal and that no one of them can be ignored or belittled because of the context from which it arises.

As depressing as all of this sounds, Foer delivers a shimmering ray of hope for his readers. He uses these situations to show us the importance of telling those we care for that they are loved, even if you don’t think you need to. When Oskar’s grandmother is talking about telling those you love how you feel about them, she tells Oskar, “it is always necessary. I love you” (314). Foer sums up one of the main messages of the novel in these few words. Throughout the story there is so much pain that it gets hard to focus on what good there is in life. Foer urges his audience to recognize that there is still good in life, even when it seems shrouded by sorrow, and that it is always important to recognize and appreciate that good.

He also sends the message to his readers throughout the story that sometimes our sorrows bring us together with other people who can influence our lives. There is a whole world that Oskar had never explored before he begins his journey to find the lock. By the end of the novel, he has met a lot of people, each one dealing with their own issues. By the end of the novel, we see how interconnected sorrow can be. In a sense, Foer tells his readers that we are brought together by the fact that we all feel alone at times.

All in all, Foer’s novel is well written and delivers a powerful message to readers about the importance of life. He sends us away a bit wiser than we were before we read his book. By forcing us to look at the not-so-pleasant aspects of life, he shows us how to appreciate those aspects with which our life is blessed. As a person who will never forget the day the planes hit the Twin Towers, I feel that this book has helped me to look at the world in which I live differently and come to some realizations about life and about my own generation that are both relevant and valuable.