FICTION
Charming and quirky
HARINI NARAYANAN
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When he is not trying too hard to be cute or clever, or both, Jonathan Safran Foer can tell a good story.
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer, 2005.
WHEN he is not trying too hard to be cute or clever, or both, Jonathan Safran Foer can tell a good story. He can even evoke Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the kinds of inspired resolutions he assigns to some of his protagonists' lives. Unfortunately, the strongest narrative voice in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that of Oskar Schell, a lovably awkward, heartbreakingly precocious, wholesomely upper middle-class nine-year-old who idolises his father, and it would take immense will in a writer to resist being excessively precocious in his style. Young Foer (he is still under 30 years of age, publishing his second work of fiction, after the much-hyped Everything is Illuminated) lacks such discipline. And so we are subjected to lines like: "We exist because we exist", and "Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents".
Such embarrassingly trite pronouncements are put in the mouths of the two adult raconteurs who share the story-telling with Oskar, too, and they sound particularly inappropriate coming from these two tortured, emotionally crippled individuals who express themselves most easily in the form of confessional letters that are often never sent out to their intended recipients. Foer does these otherwise very strikingly etched characters a great disservice when he makes them say things like "it's better to lose than never to have had", or "And how can you say I love you to someone you love?" Even Stephen Hawking, when he finally sits down to dictate a non-form response to Oskar's many letters, gets to say, "I wish I were a poet... I wish I had made things for life to depend on."
Ultimately, it is the narrative itself that rescues the book from the greeting-card section — whenever Foer allows himself to get on with it. At its best, Extremely Loud is a moving study of the ways in which senseless acts of global terror can affect the physical — but more importantly, psychological and emotional — lives of "ordinary" families.
A history of pain
The book's jumping-off point is the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York — an event that changes young Oskar's life forever, when his father, his hero, vanishes with the crumbling towers, without so much as leaving his family the cold satisfaction of a body to identity and bury. But pain at the hands of invisible perpetrators has been a part of the family's history for much longer: Oskar's grandparents — and co-narrators — have both been permanently scarred by the Allied carpet-bombing of Dresden. Death by fire takes macabre hold of Oskar's overactive imagination, and he decides to put on a scientific demonstration of the Hiroshima attacks for a routine classroom "show-and-tell" session, in one of the book's more moving passages.
Lovable characters
Despite all the pain caused by remote sources, though, Oskar's everyday life is played out within a cocoon created by the most uniformly generous and warm-hearted set of lovably oddball New Yorkers ever assembled in one fictional setting. The upper middle-class mid-Manhattan apartments and the eccentric characters give a feel of Neil Simon crossed with Woody Allen and every other work that this much-studied metropolis has inspired over the years. Oskar's quest is Jason's mythical quest overlaid with all of the above. It is still an interesting proposition: Oskar is seeking cold comfort one year after his father's death by rummaging in the latter's closet, when he accidentally breaks a vase and unearths a mysterious key saved in an envelope marked "Black" from its depths. He decides, with the demented logic of a nine-year-old, to find the lock that the key fits by visiting every Black listed in the New York phone book. Without giving the end away, one may say that any forebodings a reader might have that Oskar's ensuing travels through the city's five boroughs will lead to an unpleasant end are unfounded, and that Oskar ends up discovering that his mother is every bit as much a hero as his father was.
Stylistic experiments
The other notable feature about the book is stylistic. Like W.G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn, Foer intersperses his narrative with different writing, typesetting and layout styles, photographs and illustrations — some "real" and some doctored — not just to illustrate the plot but to participate in it and help it along. The end result is frequently quirky, often effective and sometimes quite moving, especially in the book's final pages, which are set up like a 12-page flip-book image of a faraway body flying backwards into the high window of a World Trade Center tower, illustrating Oskar's desperate desire to run the whole episode in reverse order to the previous night, when his father had tucked him into bed after a satisfying bedtime story about — what else — New York City.
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