If you are looking to feel something, you should read this book. Every chapter in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a plane that crashes through your chest and sets your mind on fire. Foer’s prose has the harrowing power to take the person or thing that gets you out of bed each day and then burn it from existence so that you will never see, hear, taste, smell or feel that thing again except in your memories. But even after experiencing this, within the span of a discourse you will somehow find your eyes crinkling and your lungs laughing, struck by the imparted remembrance that youthful innocence endures and not every delight evaporates. And later, I hope, you will look up past the pages and be brought back to a world where the stars have not yet departed, and you will have a newfound chance to treasure the time until they do. This is that kind of book, the kind that shoves you through a thunderstorm, spits lightning all around, and spurs you to write letters to your old friends. It takes a life to learn how to live, but if you pay attention to the trials of this story you might just learn a little more quickly.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an exploration of the human response to tragedy, endowed with a nine-year-old’s unpredictable flair and an elder or two’s remorse-ridden poignancy. Root for a young boy and an old man, two peaks on the spectrum of sincerity, as they set out on a treasure hunt that is not so much about the “treasure” as it is about discovering one’s life again. Incidentally, Foer’s characterization is what makes this novel special: everyone, from Oskar (the nine-year-old) to those he encounters along the way, exhibits such plausibly odd quirks that you cannot help but imagine the character is real. (Take Oskar’s overdone adverbs and inventions. What about an EEG skullcap connected to a hardback, which could record emotional responses and funnel them into new readers as a preview of what to expect?) This book is, in essence, “Humans of New York” done well and done first. Foer has captured the moment, and it is beautiful and sad.
[Spoiler Postscript] I wasn’t expressly happy with some of the plot explanations at the end, notably the idea that Oskar’s mother orchestrated the hunt (because I feel that the lack of candor cheapens the interactions). I was also surprised at the lack of real closure vis-à-vis the Reconnaissance Expedition, but it makes sense given the subject matter and was also prescribed at the beginning. In any event, as you’ve probably gathered from the earlier paragraphs, I found the book to be affecting and thought-provoking as a whole, and I expect that I will remember it.