Book-club enthusiasts and literary aesthetes recognize Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as an enduring written representation of Sept. 11, 2001. Post-modern devotees praised its form-bending experiments, including a flip-book which shows a man careening to his fate from an inflamed tower. Most people best know Foer's novel as a recent film adaptation starring Tom Hanks. But popularity, as this novel proves, is hardly an index of quality.
Foer's novel is ambitious in scope, yet the reader is left with the sense that nothing really happens. Granted, beneath the tiresome layers of text and de-linearity and pastiche, there is a good measure of charm and heart. The story is sufficiently elaborate - and even engaging - in its rendering of 9-year-old Oskar Schell's journey to find an elusive door which his late father's key will open. With his fascinating oddities and uninhibited motormouth, Oskar is the perfect outlet for the overzealous creativity of a young, brainy author such as Foer, who was 27 years old when he wrote Extremely Loud. The writing is impeccable, rather quotable and true to the emotions Foer understands. But the novelist is hardly content to rest in the intricacies of this precious, evocative child, or in the commentary of his aloof and treacherous mother. Even his father, who passed away in the tragedy, is made into a social casualty.
Foer uses his characters as a springboard to delve into a surreal family history via flashbacks and frame narratives, while his playfulness manifests itself into an equally surreal mix of signs and signifiers. There are handwritten pages, pages of letters, pages with pictures, pages with scratched out words and pages which contain only a single sentence. The inclusion of these unusual structural elements may have been successful in a book, perhaps, of greater length or greater weight. But Foer's novel comes out diluted, lost in its effort to be as significant as possible. The reader gets the distinct feeling that Foer's structural "innovations" are for show rather than substance, an effort to place himself among the post-modern greats.
The fact remains, however, that Extremely Loud is neither great nor innovative, as Foer recycles the gimmicks used by post-modern masters such as Donald Barthelme and Italo Calvino. Indeed, the simultaneous stories and pictorial elements are not new - various novelists have used these modes throughout the past 20 years, and to greater effect. But what holds Foer back is his insistence that things can mean both everything and nothing, an incongruence which requires too great an effort for so lackluster a novel. The result comes out postured - like the "painting" of a white canvas - and frustrating in its inconclusiveness. We never knew what the clues were, who the people were, what the point of the stories was or even what the anticlimactic key meant. We only know that it was meant to mean something.
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