Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I've just finished a book by Jonathan Safran Foer called "Extermely Loud and Incredibly Close", which I found very moving. I was on the tube as I got to the end of the book and I could feel tears coming. Reviewers have criticised the book for its whimsicality and there are elements of that, but overall I thought it was a great read.

I'd read Safran Foer's previous book "Everything is Illuminated" and found it interesting but mixed - he tells the story in several different voices, not all of which are so easy to read. The main voice is a very entertaining one though, a young, naive "translator" (that's what he calls himself) called Alex.

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" uses some of the same devices as the earlier book - various voices, some of which are heavier going than others and a foreground character who this time is a clever young boy with apparently autistic tendencies. In the first book Safran Foer dealt with Holocaust survival and in this one his main character's father dies in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Oskar (the young boy) describes his grief as "heavy boots" and he thinks up inventions in order to stop himself thinking of bad things. At one point he has the idea that there should be a channel under everybody's pillow to drain their tears to the reservoir in Central Park. Each morning a special report would tell everyone the emotional state of the city and occasionally, on the worst days, everybody would be called upon to bring sandbags to shore up the banks of the reservoir and stop it from overflowing. If you think that kind of metaphor is silly or cloying, don't read this book. I found it lovely.

In "Everything is Illuminated", the author himself appears, looking for the person who saved his father from the Nazis. There is a parallel in the later novel (perhaps there being so many close similarities is a weakness, well, let's see if the next one is the same); Oskar goes on an impossible quest in search of the lock which fits a key he finds in his father's closet. He has many wonderful adventures which in the end seem to have become therapy for Oskar and when he comes to the end, he realises that the search made him feel closer to his father than reaching its conclusion.

Dealing with the trauma of the aftermath of 9/11 is obviously very hard for a novelist and I guess it's inevitable that writers will do it obliquely (for instance by using the voice of an autistic child). One scene that I thought benefited from this was where Oskar gives a talk at school about the experience of people in a Japanese city hit by an atomic bomb. His schoolmates are grossed out by the horrible details while Oskar enthuses over technicalities. We see Oskar's isolation from his schoolmates and in the process a question occurs; how do we feel about 9/11? Because there were no survivors and hardly any remains, there are no similarly gruesome stories for 9/11, just the haunting phone messages and the images of falling bodies. Oskar has his own reactions to both these motifs.

Many people will find this book too trite to handle its subject, and the author crass for turning 9/11 into entertainment, but as I say I found parts of it very moving. Oskar is sent home from school on the fateful day and plays five messages from his dad on the answerphone. He replaces the answerphone with an identical one so that he can protect his mum from the messages, but feels compelled to keep playing them. Later we hear that the fifth message was his father repeating "Are you there?" eleven times. Oskar was in the house and heard his father leaving this message, but was unable to answer the phone. he carries a burden of guilt for that. You finish the book wondering whether he would shed that burden.