extremely loud and incredibly close book reviews

Terror Comes to Tiny Town

If Jonathan Safran Foer ever tells his readers what he thinks and feels, he tells it slant. Half of his celebrated debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated , consisted of tiresome magic-realist yarns about a Ukrainian shtetl, written by a quasi-fictional Jonathan Safran Foer. The other half was a brilliant yet tender satire of life in postcommunist Eastern Europe told by the young guide who escorts “Foer” to the village’s ruins. The real Foer’s second and latest novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , shows that he hasn’t lost his taste for naïve or otherwise unreliable narrators. It looks at September 11 through the eyes of Oskar Schell, a weird, precocious 9-year-old whose father died in the World Trade Center collapse.

In a novel about the Holocaust, this kind of oblique, even playful, strategy worked, partly because the subject has already been so exhaustively and earnestly explored. But September 11, that spectacular monstrosity plopped into the middle of an ordinary Tuesday in downtown Manhattan, is another matter. We’re still not entirely sure what it signifies, or even if, philosophically speaking (and this is the hardest possibility to contemplate), it might signify nothing at all. It may just be too early to get cute in writing about September 11; on the other hand, there’s never a good time to get as cute as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close gets.

This novel, like Everything Is Illuminated , is a braided story, with the main strand told by Oskar. The book’s slender plot hangs on a key Oskar finds among his father’s things and the boy’s quest to find the lock that fits it. The other strands come in the form of letters and diaries written by his paternal grandparents, middle-class Germans whose psyches were irrevocably maimed by the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945.

What attracts Foer to these tragedies isn’t so much their historical resonance as their emotional power: They opened up great, weeping maws of grief and loss. He’s drawn to pathos, but being a smart and self-conscious young writer, he’s also painfully aware of the perils of sentimentality. With a child narrator like Oskar, you can finesse the problem; he can’t be expected to realize his own poignancy, let alone be accused of wallowing in it. The distance makes Foer think—incorrectly—that he can get away with whimsies like having Oskar imagine a “special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York,” collecting the tears of people who cry themselves to sleep and funneling them into the Central Park reservoir.

Perhaps Foer could have pulled this off if Oskar felt alive. Instead, Oskar resembles nothing so much as a plastic bag crammed with oddities. For every eccentricity that makes psychological sense—fear of public transportation or an overly clinical interest in the bombing of Hiroshima, for example—there’s another that’s just piled on. We never learn why Oskar insists on wearing only white or plays the tambourine incessantly. He’s an alien, but you can’t quite figure out how he got that way. If he learned about sex from the Internet, as he claims, how come he knows that “hump” is a slang term for intercourse, but not that “pussy” can refer to something other than a cat?

A 9-year-old can be an unpredictable mix of child and adult, but when not making fart jokes, Oskar is prone to reflections beyond the emotional sophistication of any kid, however brainy. It’s possible to believe that he spends his days writing letters to famous people, but not that, noticing he’s used his valuable stamp collection for postage, he could wonder “if what I was really doing was trying to get rid of things.” Oskar isn’t the only character prone to drifting out of focus and becoming a device serving the author’s purposes rather than a fully imagined human being. How else could Oskar’s grandmother, a nice, seventysomething, bourgeois German woman, in a letter to her grandson, describe the loss of her virginity in such poetic detail? The photographs and typographically unconventional pages strewn throughout the book are a particularly precious touch.

Despite this elaborate presentation, there’s a miscalculation at the heart of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close : The death of a beloved parent will always be cataclysmic to a child, but the attacks of September 11 were also cataclysmic in another way, a way that can only be understood with the perspective and context that comes from an adult’s experience. Choosing a child narrator gives Foer access to extravagant emotions and quirky imaginings that would seem cloying or self-indulgent in a grown-up, but at the cost of allowing the central trauma its due. September 11 was a surreal intrusion of the spectacular and malevolent into the banal and safe. But for a kid like Oskar, reality has yet to be fully established, so surreality is impossible. How and why his father was lost matters little next to the raw fact of his disappearance.

At times, you can detect Foer trying to adjust for this mistake, but he doesn’t succeed at the one thing that might have transcended it: conviction in his characters. When Oskar’s grandfather returns after a 40-year absence, he’s more like an old appliance pulled out of the closet than a person who’s been living a life elsewhere in the intervening decades. If their creator can’t quite manage to believe in these people, how can we?

  Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel started out as a very different book—one completely unrelated to September 11. In 2002, Foer told reporters he’d completed a novel called The Zelnik Museum , which was set in a New York museum dedicated to a famous diarist and had an 11-year-old narrator named Jonathan Safran Foer . “The more I write,” he explained, “the funnier it becomes.” Now the finished product is considerably more solemn. Nicole Aragi , his agent, says, “The novel began life as Zelnik, told from the point of view of an old man looking back through relics relating to a lost love.”  

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close By Jonathan Safran Foer. Houghton Mifflin. 368 pages. $24.95.

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A key, a silent old man and a magical tambourine

No movie has ever been able to provide a catharsis for the Holocaust, and I suspect none will ever be able to provide one for 9/11. Such subjects overwhelm art. The artist’s usual tactic is to center on individuals whose lives are a rebuke to the tragedy. They sidestep the actual event and focus on a parallel event that ends happily, giving us a sentimental reason to find consolation. That is small comfort to the dead.

“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” tells the story of an 11-year-old boy named Oskar Schell, who is played by the gifted and very well cast Thomas Horn . His father was killed in 9/11. Indeed, intensely scrutinizing videos of bodies falling from one of the towers, Oskar fancies he can actually identify him. We see a lot of Thomas, his father, in flashbacks, and he is played by Tom Hanks , who has come to embody an American Everyman. As a father, Thomas was a paragon, spending countless quality hours with Oskar and involving the bright kid in ingenious mind games. Perhaps he suspected what Oskar now tells us about himself: He may have Asperger’s syndrome, a condition affecting those who are very intelligent but lack ordinary social skills. For a kid like that, driven to complete tasks he has set for himself, his dad’s challenges are compelling.

The film opens with the father’s funeral (the casket is empty). We meet Oskar’s mother, Linda ( Sandra Bullock ), who Thomas feels distant from and resents for being the parent who is still alive. He has no idea how much he hurts her. He is close with his grandmother ( Zoe Caldwell ) and learns that his paternal grandparents were Holocaust victims.

In a vase on the upper shelf of a closet, Oskar finds an envelope with the word “Black” on it. It contains a key. Oskar decides that the key might unlock a secret of his father’s past — perhaps a message. Because the word is capitalized, he decides it is a name, and he sets out to visit everyone named Black in New York City. From a city phone book, he comes up with a list of 472 of them. Oskar sets out on foot, because one of his peculiarities is that he won’t use public transportation. To boost his confidence, he takes along his tambourine. That he is able to undertake this task while apparently keeping it a secret from his mother is a tribute to his intelligence. That he thinks it’s safe for an 11-year-old to walk alone all over New York is not.

We don’t follow him on every visit, but the first one makes a big impression. He knocks on the door of Abby Black ( Viola Davis ), who invites him in, hears his story and tries to help him. Oskar’s social skills don’t extend to noticing that Abby is in the middle of a marital crisis with her husband ( Jeffrey Wright ). Davis and Wright are so good here, in roles that work mostly by implication, that Oskar’s quest starts off on the right foot emotionally.

What do we learn during this quest? That more than 4,000 may have died in the 9/11 terrorism, but millions more still live? That those named Black form a cross-section of the metropolis? That life goes on? Oskar is not entirely alone. He is seen off by his building’s doorman ( John Goodman ), and soon he makes a new friend. This very old man, known only as the Renter (Max von Sydow), has moved in with Oskar’s grandmother. He cannot or will not speak, communicating only with written notes, but he is a tall and reassuring companion. (Some will observe that von Sydow played chess with Death in “ The Seventh Seal ,” a connection that might appeal to Oskar’s analytical mind.) You will discover if the key unlocks anything, or if the search for its lock is itself the purpose.

The screenplay is by Eric Roth , whose “ Forrest Gump ” and “ The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ” also were about strange journeys in life. The director is Stephen Daldry , whose “ The Reader ” also approached the Holocaust obliquely. There may be some significance in the name Oskar, from Jonathan Safran Foer’s original novel; that was the name of the hero of Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, about a boy who travels around Europe during World War II and carries not a tambourine, but a drum.

You will not discover, however, why it was thought this story needed to be told. There must be a more plausible story to be told about a boy who lost his father on 9/11. This plot is contrivance and folderol. The mysterious key, the silent old man and the magical tambourine are the stuff of fairy tales, and the notion of a boy walking all over New York is so preposterous we’re constantly aware of it as a storytelling device. The events of 9/11 have left indelible scars. They cannot be healed in such a simplistic way.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Tom Hanks as Thomas Schell
• Thomas Horn as Oskar Schell
• Max von Sydow as The Renter
• Sandra Bullock as Linda Schell
• Zoe Caldwell as Grandmother
• Viola Davis as Abby Black
• John Goodman as Stan the Doorman
• Jeffrey Wright as William Black

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'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close': Everything Is Included

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By Walter Kirn

• April 3, 2005

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE By Jonathan Safran Foer. Illustrated. 326pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $24.95.

ITS title is "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," but it will also be known, inevitably, perhaps primarily, and surely intentionally, as that new Sept. 11 novel whose last pages include a little flip-book of video stills arranged in reverse order to create a fleeting, blurry movie of an actual human being careering upward through the sky toward the top of the fiery doomed tower from which (softheaded moralists will note, to the bafflement of hardened aesthetes) the fresh-and-blood person on the film was - in undoctored, forward-rushing fact-jumping or falling to his death.

Does a novel with such a high-concept visual kicker (and sensational book-club conversation starter) even need a title at all?

Does it even need text?

Besides containing a wealth of other photographs and attention-grabbing graphic elements, Jonathan Safran Foer's second novel (his first was "Everything Is Illuminated") positively teems with text -- most, but not all, of which takes the form of prose. There's a distinction, of course, and Foer is just the sort of brainy, playful young writer, his critical faculties honed by the academy and his multimedia sensibilities shaped by the Internet and heaven knows what else, for whom this arcane distinction is second nature and a perfect excuse for fun and games. To Foer and his peers (who can't really be called experimental, since their signature high jinks, distortions and addenda first came to market many decades back and now represent a popular mode that's no more controversial than pre-ripped bluejeans), a novel is an object composed of pages tattooable with an infinite variety of nonsentence-like signs and signifiers. As Foer's new book demonstrates, some pages can even be left blank.

Oskar Schell is the 9-year-old New Yorker whose motormouth drives Foer's story. He's a cross between J. D. Salinger's precocious, morbid, psychiatry-proof child philosophers and all those daunting city kids from children's books whose restless high spirits and social confidence get them into funny predicaments while their preoccupied but loving parents conduct their mysterious offstage grown-up business -- business that they'll come home from just in time to save their offspring from real trouble.

Which is pretty much how things go in Foer's novel. A conscious homage to the Gotham wise-child genre, the book features several beloved stock characters, down to the nice doorman and other service folk who help their upper-middle-class young wards get around the urban jungle safely. Foer chose this quaint template for an ingenious reason: it evokes, at a primal cultural level, the benevolent, innocent New York that was vaporized, even as a fantasy, when the towers were toppled. Not all the victims, Foer knows, were real, live people. Eloise and Stuart Little died, too.+

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EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE

by Jonathan Safran Foer ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2005

Much more is revealed as this brilliant fiction works thrilling variations on, and consolations for, its plangent message:...

The search for the lock that fits a mysterious key dovetails with related and parallel quests in this (literally) beautifully designed second from the gifted young author ( Everything Is Illuminated , 2002).

The searcher is nine-year-old Oskar Schell, an inventive prodigy who (albeit modeled on the protagonist of Grass’s The Tin Drum ) employs his considerable intellect with refreshing originality in the aftermath of his father Thomas’s death following the bombing of the World Trade Center. That key, unidentified except for the word “black” on the envelope containing it, impels Oskar to seek out every New Yorker bearing the surname Black, involving him with a reclusive centenarian former war correspondent, and eventually the nameless elderly recluse who rents a room in his paternal grandma’s nearby apartment. Meanwhile, unmailed letters from a likewise unidentified “Thomas” reveal their author’s loneliness and guilt, while stretching backward to wartime Germany and a horrific precursor of the 9/11 atrocity: the firebombing of Dresden. In a riveting narrative animated both by Oskar’s ingenuous assumption of adult responsibility and understanding (interestingly, he’s “playing Yorick” in a school production of Hamlet ) and the letter-writer’s meaningful silences, Foer sprinkles his tricky text with interpolated illustrations that render both objects of Oskar’s many interests and the word and memories of a survivor who has forsworn speech, determined to avoid the pain of loving too deeply. The story climaxes as Oskar discovers what the key fits, and also the meaning of his life (all our lives, actually), in a long-awaited letter from astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

Pub Date: April 4, 2005

ISBN: 0-618-32970-6

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

LITERARY FICTION

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IN THE NEWS

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

SEEN & HEARD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, extremely loud and incredibly close.

Ten-year-old Oskar Schell is one of those amazingly endearing and incredibly affecting characters who stays with you long after the book is done. He, along with his grandparents, serves as narrator of Jonathan Safran Foer's eagerly anticipated follow-up to EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED. Oskar's favorite pastimes include spotting grammatical errors in the New York Times and participating in elaborate scavenger hunts organized by his attorney father, Eli.

Sadly, Eli was killed in the World Trade Center on September 11th. Before the tower he was in collapsed, he managed to place several calls to his family --- Oskar overheard the last call but was too petrified to answer the phone. He never told his mother about the messages because he was far too ashamed of his cowardice and he felt certain that it would be too upsetting for her.

After his father's death, Oskar discovers a vase in his parents' closet with a key hidden inside an envelope with the word "black" written on it. Convinced this is a clue left behind by his father, he sets about trying to solve the mystery and begins by contacting everyone in the Manhattan phone book with the surname "Black."

Oskar's story is intercut with the story of his grandparents --- his father's parents. He is very close to his grandmother but he never knew his grandfather, a mute who communicated by using a book where he would scribble words and phrases. He left his grandmother years ago as the firebombing of Dresden tore their worlds apart. Their story weaves its way into the modern-day narrative and coincides with Oskar's search to find out more about his father.

An ambitious and moving novel, Safran Foer uses eclectic and sometimes disturbing photographs (several images are of a body falling from the World Trade Center), word images and even blank pages to punctuate his message of a family's love and loss. Much like the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon's THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, the reader is endeared to the character of Oskar, with his mixture of odd maturity and sweet innocence. Among the first wave of post 9-11 fiction, Safran Foer bravely branches out stylistically while cleverly weaving the stories of two families' grief into an effective and moving novel.

Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller on January 21, 2011

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

• Publication Date: April 4, 2005
• Genres: Fiction
• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• ISBN-10: 0618329706
• ISBN-13: 9780618329700

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Extremely loud and incredibly close.

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Book Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close follows a nine-year-old boy named Oscar coming to terms with life after his father's death on 9/11. When looking through his dad's things, Oscar breaks a vase and finds a key and a mysterious envelope labeled "Black". He decides to embark on a mission to find every person named Black in New York City in an attempt to find the one Black who knew his father. Along the way, he meets new friends and discovers more about those he already knew. This book is written from the alternating perspectives of Oscar, his grandmother, and his mute grandfather whom Oscar has never met. This adds an interesting layer to the story, as Oscar lost a parent in 9/11 and his grandparents, both children at the time, lost their families in the bombing of Dresden. This shows a theme throughout this book that grief from war and terror is universal. This book's overall commentary on the human experience and grief, both individual and collectively experienced by a nation, shows the skill and thoughtfulness of the author. On a personal level, I did not find the characters particularly enticing and had a hard time following the plot at times, but I would still recommend the book, especially to someone with an interest in 9/11 or the world wars.

• Arts & Culture / Featured

Banned Books in Review: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

· January 5, 2023

By Ben Olson Reader Staff

More than 1,600 books across 32 states were banned during the 2021-2022 school year. In Idaho, 26 titles were banned across three school districts, underscoring a trend spearheaded largely by right-wing religious groups pushing for censorship of books that feature LGBTQ+ characters, as well as sexual and racial situations they deem inappropriate for children.  

In an attempt to shed light on this development, I have pledged to read all 26 books banned last year in Idaho and share with our readers what they are all about, why they were likely banned and what we are missing by promoting censorship of the written word.  

American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer is perhaps best known for his debut novel Everything is Illuminated , released in 2002, but is slowly gaining more recognition for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close after it has been recognized as one of the most banned books in America during the last decade.

Safran Foer was born into a Jewish family in Washington, D.C. and was a self-described “flamboyant” and “sensitive” child who said he suffered, “something like a nervous breakdown” after a chemical accident in his classroom at the age of 8. As a result, Safran Foer always felt like he wanted to be “outside his own skin.”

Safran Foer took an introductory writing course with Joyce Carol Oates, who took an interest in his writing.  

Author Jonathan Safran Foer.

“My life really changed after that,” he said later.

After graduating from Princeton in 1999, Safran Foer briefly attended medical school before dropping out to pursue his writing career full time. To date, he has published four novels and three works of nonfiction.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is Safran Foer’s second novel, using the events of the 9/11 terrorist attack as the backdrop for the story. The protagonist is 8-year-old Oskar Schell, who learns how to deal with the death of his father in the attack on the World Trade Center.  

The novel follows multiple interconnected storylines, and is filled with odd additions that give it a surreal format both lauded and panned by critics.

Oskar’s dad owned a jewelry store and had a meeting at the World Trade Center the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He subsequently died in the attacks, though his body was never recovered, and the book centers around Oskar’s peculiar way of dealing with his sudden grief.

While Oskar is extremely intelligent, he’s also clearly on the autistic spectrum and doesn’t process things like everyone else. His dad left a series of messages on the answering machine prior to the towers falling, adding guilt to Oskar’s grief because he didn’t pick up the final call right before the towers came down.

While rummaging through his dad’s things, Oskar comes across an envelope in his dad’s closet with a key inside of it. In an effort to feel close to his father again, Oskar embarks on a journey with the key, attempting to find the lock it fits.

Alongside Oskar’s story is a dual narrative about his grandparents, who tell their own tale through a series of letters sprinkled throughout the novel.

The dual storylines are at times brilliant, but can also be confusing and, dare I say, pretentious. What’s most powerful about this novel is the ability for Oskar to say and do whatever is on his mind without a filter, culminating in sections that are heartbreaking, hilarious, insightful and downright gut-wrenching at times.

Why it was banned

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close has been banned in multiple school districts across America for most of its time in print. Reasons vary, but the consensus largely centers around several passages in the book that were “extremely vulgar detailing sexual acts.” Other reasons found online at several banned book sites are for the inclusion of “profanity, sex and descriptions of violence.”

Oskar uses colorful language at times, but it seems to fall well short of “vulgar,” unless being read by someone who hasn’t interacted with another human being before.

One element that I picked up on, though, was Oskar referring to himself as an atheist, which might have offended the religious guardians of free thought that seem to dictate what’s appropriate for children to read in schools nowadays.

I was left scratching my head after reading this novel, unsure of why it has such a notorious reputation as a repeatedly banned book.

Final thoughts

There are books I’ve read which I would acknowledge aren’t suitable for children. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close isn’t one of them. It’s a smart, quirky novel with a few risque sections and a spirited vocabulary from the 8-year-old protagonist, but other than that, there is no reason this book should be banned from schools.

The National Coalition Against Censorship might have put it best when responding to those who believed Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close should be banned: “Removing a book with recognized literary and pedagogical merit simply because a few parents disapprove of it not only disserves the educational interests of students but also raises serious constitutional concerns.”

Stay tuned for future editions of the Reader where I review books banned in Idaho recently.

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Tags: banned book review Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer

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literaryelephant

Review: extremely loud and incredibly close.

I’ve got a 9/11 book to talk about today. I like to keep an ebook going in the background so that I can read when I don’t have a physical book (which is rare but it happens) and because there are different things available to me in that format. But as a background book, Jonathan Safran Foer’s YA historical/contemporary fiction novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close took me months to finish and I only recently pushed myself to give it more focus as the anniversary of the 2001 attack approached.

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living.”

I want to start by acknowledging that I would probably have had a better experience and more to say about this book if I had read a physical copy (my preferred reading method) in a reasonable time frame; as it was, I liked the story a lot but it’s a difficult novel to be stopping and starting in small chunks and that using method absolutely shaped my experience of the book.

“…the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close  is narrated with stream-of-consciousness; though there are a few main perspectives it follows, all are presented with the same style and voice despite the differences in their stories. There are very few “chapters,” paragraphs and even sentences go on and on, and there are pictures dispersed throughout that correspond to the characters’ stories. I’d be curious to pick up a physical copy and see what it’s like on the page, because on screen it seemed a bit chaotic and it was consistently hard to find a good place to pause reading. I think this would be an excellent book to binge-read, and I regret that I didn’t take that route.

But back to the story. This is a book about 9/11, but also it’s not about 9/11. It’s about Oskar’s attempts to cope after the attack, but it’s also about other, older grief that Oskar doesn’t even know he is a part of. It’s about his journey for the lock that corresponds to his father’s mysterious key. Oskar’s and Thomas’s stories are the central focus of the novel, and they are both characters left behind after the attack. There is no perspective for Oskar’s father, who dies in the attack. Though he remains on the outskirts of the narration, Oskar’s father is the link that connects all of the rest of the characters, all of whom have stories that are part of a larger whole.

Oskar shows some signs of being on the Autism spectrum, though this is never discussed in the text of the book. Personally, I like the theory that he is. There are times when the events of this book and some of the characters’ interactions felt a little unbelievable, or at least implausible, and I think some of this is smoothed by the possibility of Oskar’s autism– though I don’t think as many people in real life would respond as kindly and patiently to Oskar as they do in this novel. Also, Oskar is unusually intelligent and philosophical for a nine year-old.

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

And on the topic of grief, this is a book that leaves the reader grieving right along with the characters. It isn’t the sort of sad that hits you all at once and makes you cry (at least it wasn’t for me, but then again I didn’t read the book all at once either); there is some  hope as well, but there are a lot of painful little details that pile up. It’s a lot of little cuts, not one fatal stab. For Oskar, and for Thomas, the world is abrasive. Thomas is so devastated that he has not spoken in decades. There is definitely some morbidity to the commentary throughout the book, but it comes from a place of deep loss and is so utterly human. I couldn’t resist.

“That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”

My reaction: 4 out of 5 stars. I’m not always a fan of stream-of-consciousness narration and there were a few places in this book where it started to wear on me. It’s also not an ideal style to be reading in small pieces over a long period of time. And I really do think the physical copy would be the way to go with this title because the format is so interesting. But despite those downsides, I loved reading this book. I want to pick up another Jonathan Safran Foer book (possibly Here I   Am ) to see whether I’ll like his work as well in another story and format, or if this one was a perfect storm.

Further recommendations:

• If you like reading about characters who may or may not be on the spectrum, try Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine . Though this book features a grown woman rather than a young child, Eleanor is also dealing with a separation from a parent and is an incredibly endearing (sometimes sad and sometimes funny) character with a wonderful story to share.

Are there any novels about 9/11 or other specific events in US history that you love?

The Literary Elephant

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6 thoughts on “review: extremely loud and incredibly close”.

I really love the excerpts that you use in your reviews. I feel like they’re very well-chosen and do justice to the books you choose. Thanks for another great review!

Like Liked by 1 person

Thanks! Fitting in the excerpts is probably my favorite part of writing reviews, to be honest. Giving the author/characters a voice is a good way to remind myself that there’s more to the book than my own opinion. There were a ton of great quotes to choose from with this book, so I’m glad the ones I used were a good fit. Thank you for reading!

I really want to read this!

I definitely recommend picking it up! Hope you enjoy. 🙂

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Book Review

“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.”

Author: Jonathan Safran Foer                   Published : 2005                 Pages : 368

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close depicts the crushing torment of a vulnerable nine-year-old boy coping with grief. Foer captures the innocence of childhood and presents Oskar’s naivety in such a way that you can’t help but fall in love with him. Throughout the book Oskar creates many inventions, some of which are truly inspiring; from a skyscraper that moves up and down so if a “plane hits below you, the building could take you to the ground, and everyone could be safe” to microphones that everyone swallows so you could hear everyone’s hearts beating together “sort of like sonar.” Foer’s writing is beautiful and absolutely breath-taking. While the book is told from such a young voice, it raises deep and moral questions about the state of humanity and its attitudes towards violence. 9/11 is something that should not be forgotten quickly, and this novel certainly highlights the tragedy of those caught in the crossfire of mankind’s endless destruction in its pursuit of dominance.

John Boyne uses a quote to describe his novel The Boy in Striped Pyjamas which I think is quite befitting for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:

“A story of innocence in a world of ignorance.”

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