Inarguably, one of the greatest challenges facing contemporary novelists is how to write about the events of September 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks of that morning -- and the subsequent emotional, political and cultural fallout -- were so thoroughly covered by the broadcast media that one wonders what the written word can tell us that endless hours of television footage hasn't already.
It is this hefty task that author Jonathan Safran Foer undertakes in his second novel, the kaleidoscopic Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Like his previous novel, Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud... is a wild and rambling search for truth, meaning and other warm, comforting emotional concepts. In this novel, however, the goal is crucial to a post-Sept. 11 America: making sense of that dark day.
Our Odysseus is the 11-year-old New Yorker Oskar Schell, and his odyssey takes him through a fractured New York City. Young Oskar is the kind of protagonist some readers will warm to and others will shy away from -- his intelligence and perception are light years beyond his age. He's an avid student of French language and culture, he's read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time -- In short, he's your standard intellectual in the making. Sometimes superior insight in such a young character can border on the unbelievable: How come a kid who throws around the term raison d'etre pronounces E.S.P. "esp"?
Despite such minor gripes, it is hard not to feel for Oskar as he searches the city that never sleeps on a near-impossible quest: to find the lock that fits a mysterious key that belonged to Oskar's father, who died in the World Trade Center. The boy feels that if he solves this puzzle he can finally accept his father's death and qualm his near-constant feeling of "heavy boots" (his term for depression).
Along the way, as befitting any journey, ancient or contemporary, Oskar comes into contact with a series of New Yorkers. These characters range from the sympathetic (a melancholy young wife who may be the missing link in Oskar's quest) to the wildly postmodern (an Empire State Building tour guide who has lived there for years). Again, given that Extremely Loud... is such an experimental novel, you'll either believe it or not.
Though the outrageousness of Foer's novel can be tough to chew at times, such narrative and stylistic free-flowing seems the only way to digest Sept. 11 from a literary point of view. The book is peppered with visual tricks: pages composed of a single sentence, a centerfold spread of a flock of city birds and even an autobiographical narrative from one of Oskar's relatives that becomes so complex it literally writes over itself so the text becomes illegible.
Underneath all these whiz-bang pyrotechnics, however, is a touching story, one that deals with post-Sept. 11 life through young eyes.
Though at times Extremely Loud..., with its Joycean attention to urban geography, feels like a novel meant only for New Yorkers, the broader emotions of loss, nostalgia and hope are accessible to all.
The book's final pages -- a collection of digitally-tinkered images that compose a flipbook of sorts -- takes a singularly horrid icon of that dark September morning and transforms it into a symbol of transcendence. Despite years of visually-exploited coverage in the popular media, Foer's novel suggests the solution to grasping Sept. 11 lies neither in words nor images, but a hybrid of the two.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
