By Jonathan Safran Foer, Houghton Mifflin, April 2005
When I put it down and my husband asked me if it was good, I cried. This book is not for the faint of heart and in an odd way, I would hate recommending it to someone who I would be afraid wouldn't have the same response. It would be like someone dirtying up holy ground. The book itself not being holy, rather, the subject matter is sacrosanct. I read the book in its entirety with my heart in my throat alternately aching painfully and anxiously awaiting the next poignant scene.
I think I read it through my own experience regarding the events of 9/11, who doesn't read a book subjectively? I found myself reliving each moment of the tragic day and then the weeks that followed.
Everyone says they remember where they were (if they were alive and cognizant, of course) when JFK was shot. For me, my defining day will always be 9/11: I got up as usual, early to run over to my in-laws to work out in their workout room. My brother in law happened to be there, too. The phone rang...we were watching a strong man competition (not my choice, as a matter of fact) and it was my husband who told us to turn on the news. We saw the second plane hit, and then we knew it was no accident. The brother in law and I didn't converse much after that, it was mostly shock as we processed, he thinking of the plane he wouldn't be flying on that day, and I thinking of the details of a day ahead with my two little ones. I took the kids to get their hair cut, I went to the store, all barely conversing with the people we encountered, and then everything closed.
I spent some time that day calling my friend who lives in NYC, but the lines were all busy. That night, as I nursed my baby late I heard the eerie silence in the sky...no planes flying overhead. All the while processing processing, what will this world be like from now on? The news was on without ceasing, we were all walking around digesting this new cruel reality. We were like Dorothy and crew in the Wizard of Oz, the veil was lifted and the world was much less magical and much less hopeful than before.
My husband and I had actually scheduled a trip to NYC earlier that summer for the beginning of November 2001. I didn't think we should go, of course, leaving our children and heading to the place where all of our fears lay exposed. Being there meant flying, subway and train riding and all the things that now had become echoes of the horror of September 11th. We went anyway.
Back to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: The story of a young boy, Oskar, whose father was killed during the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Funny that I didn't mention the jist of the story yet...obviously my first response was completely personal. One of the things this book does well is illuminate humankind's need for connection, made more profoundly real by 9/11. It then takes the events of those days and illustrates the way in which this tragedy both drew humans together and yet reveals how far apart we construct ourselves and lives to be. Oskar's memories of his father include the last story he told him (which he clings to as if it held some answer to the pain he feels) the night before he died. His father was loving, brilliant and perfect in his memory of him and the loss of him is agonizing as only it can be for an 8 year old coping with the terrible reality of life...too terrible for an 8 year old, actually too terrible for anyone. The nursing of the pain of his loss of his father is almost what keeps him going. Oskar's story is juxtaposed against the story of his grandfather who also suffered terribly during the Holocaust. Life is full of pain...the line that reverberates through the text is something along the lines of "living is more painful/scary than dying." In essence though, in a way, it is the fact that we can plumb the depths of pain that we know we are really alive.
I kept thinking and remembering as I read the description of Oskar and his father's last night together, and the pain of moving forward about my own experience at Ground Zero, just five weeks after the towers fell. Smoke was still rising and the dust was thick everywhere. I called my 2 1/2 year old as we stood there feeling vulnerable and the exchange went something like this:
Child: Mommy, are you there? Mommy, are you crying?
In response I couldn't choke back the tears enough to tell her anything. My memories of NYC then were of the many many posters of, in a way, tributes to those lost that day. We slowly wandered and read and looked and mourned the loss of these unfamiliar faces. One, a picture of a loving smiling daddy, on which was written: "Daddy, I miss you, I learned to blow a bubble, I wish you could see it." I've always wondered who that boy was, how his life has been since and my emotional response to that poster spilled into the pages of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
The critics hated the gimmicks of the book (empty pages, flip-book at the end, etc...) and I saw similarities between the story and other books I have read (Catcher In the Rye, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and even Foer's wife's book, The History of Love among others). But bad press is just as good as good press, isn't it? It certainly got the critics attention and people reading it. I won't shake this story and am glad for a work that attempts to delve into pain in such a way as to make some sense of it.
