"Why does anyone ever make love?"

A review of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. 
 
It seems like anybody who's anybody is reading Jonathan Safran Foer these days. At least in the English world.  His two novels have caused rants and raves among the literary elite, so of course I would give at least one of them a try.

Foer is the new name in contemporary lit--he married Nicole Krauss (Author of The History of Love), wrote two amazing novels, and is seen as a talented "kid" in the author realm.  (Everybody who reviews Foer always comments on his age.  Saying things like, "He's so young!"  I felt jealousy because I automatically assumed he was around my age and had accomplished everything I had not.  He's 34.  Do people my age not write novels anymore?  If I wrote a novel, would people even take it seriously?  "Look, look at that girl, trying to write.  She's waaayyy too young.")

When I asked people what this book was about, most answered with "September 11th."  Which isn't necessarily true.  This story is about a young boy, Oskar, whose father died in the September 11th attacks.  Oskar is a peculiar boy--his idiosyncrasies fascinated me the most.  Quotes like, "The fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history.  In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls!" (3). Or, "Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips.  So in away, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are," (99).  For a nine-year-old, he is extremely insightful and incredibly intelligent.

Oskar and his father used to play little games like circling all of the grammatical errors in the New York Times, or going to Central Park with a metal detector, digging up things, and trying to figure out the connection between them.  After Oskar's father dies, Oskar is grieving in his own way...which distances him from his mother.  One day he finds himself in his father's closet, and discovers a blue vase with a key labeled "Black."  Thinking this is another one of his father's games, Oskar goes through the streets of New York trying to find out the lock that the key fits.

While all this is going on, Oskar's grandmother, who lives across the street, has her own story to tell.  Oskar's grandfather left her fifty years ago after they realized that they were two lonely people trying to be in love.  They got married trying to learn how to live, but instead divided their marriage and their apartment into spaces for existance and non-existance, Something and Nothing places.  They needed to be apart while they were together, and made up rules on how to live.

What sets this book apart are the images, variances in punctuation, and shifts in narrator.  While some might find the images and page-breaks gimmicky, I believe them to have extremely important purpose, especially the narration/punctuation shifts.  Oskar's narration is mostly in perfect paragraphs.  His grandmother's is in choppy line breaks, his grandfather's (who also has a tale to tell) sometimes fills a whole page with one sentence... one sentence per page for twenty or so pages.  Annoying?  Maybe.  Reflecting each character's internal processing of grief and life?  Definitely.  The differences in punctuation complimented the character's personalities incredibly well.  I found the characters extremely relatable...without better words to describe them...they are so very human.  The stream-of-consciousness is represented perfectly, so you are sucked into the mind of the narrator.

While looking online reading reviews about this novel by people more intelligent than I, many found the ending to be incredibly emotional, cried their eyeballs out, and claimed this to be the revolutionary novel of the 21st century.  ...I am still trying to figure this novel out.  It has left me in a mentally reclusive state, thinking constantly about what just came to be.  As I said before, it's a novel you experience.  I didn't cry, but I am changed, having read this book.

The story is essentially about how to grieve, but not quite.  I hesitate to even try to write a review on this book, because I am still processing it.  It is a book you experience, not simply read.  Besides being on the cutting-edge literarily (playing with spacing, pictures, stream-of-consciousness, etc), Foer spun a good tale.  The book was extremely captivating.  It has layers...meaning when I read it again I'm sure I'll catch stuff I missed the first time around.