Getting a Read: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
It’s my firm belief that when a person recommends a book to me, they’re handing me an inside look at their soul. In this series, “Getting a Read,” I try to uncover truth about books and their recommenders.
THE RECOMMENDER
Emily Burgardt, actor, director, blossoming critic, and kindred spirit. I met Emily when Jer brought her home for dinner one day about 8 months ago. Since then we’ve spent many a night laughing over Dungeons and Dragons antics, Jer’s ridiculous at-home clown life, and endless random vines-turned-youtube videos. Emily reads widely about anything that interests her, and I’m always curious to see what’s new on her shelf.
HOW TO READ IT
Swallow this book. I repeat—SWALLOW IT. Don’t wait around for a moment to arrive when you can slowly digest the text, or have brainspace to feel things, just attack it and finish it. More on why later.
REVIEW: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
My register at Barnes and Noble was overrun with sales of this book out of nowhere when I was putting in my holiday associate time back in 2008. People loved it, and at first I couldn’t figure out why. When I heard it was a 9/11 story, though, I understood. America was captured by this fictional revisiting of a deeply significant historic moment. While I empathized with the impulse to reconnect with the sadness of the period, I personally had no interest in doing so. I decided to let pop culture have its day without me and pass on reading this book.
For a too-long period of my life, I did this often. There was too much sadness around me to entice me to confront tragedy on the page as well. In this period, I learned about the world via Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, laughed myself through dinner with South Park, and read myself to sleep with light, fluffy romance novels. This was my main avenue to diffuse the tension in my daily life and I ran with it.
When Emily recommended this book to me though, thankfully, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief and accept the task. That time of my life is past and I often embrace the tragic in both my work and personal life these days. I knew it was finally time to read this text.
In the lead up to this review, I mentioned I was reading this book to a friend. Not unlike what happened with Lincoln in the Bardo, my friend admitted that he struggled to get through this book.
Why? Because of the format. Flip through this book in the store before you buy it, and you’ll see red marks, photos, keys, and dialogue that overlaps itself. It’s yet another wild book that’s noticeably different with only a cursory glance.
Even moving past the format, the difficulty continues in the words themselves. The narrative can feel unpredictable, and it takes a bit to settle into the rhythm of who’s narrating which section. Each character, further, tends to present their own thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness style, a form of writing that isn’t exactly a part of every high school, or even college, English course. It takes work to settle into the flow of it and lean into the movement of the characters’ brains.
My friend struggled to read this book carefully, thinking the best thing was to understand every word and nuance, but I’m not convinced that’s the right approach for this book. The New York Times asks whether this book even needs text at all to communicate its message, and I wondered similar things during my read through. Ultimately, my feeling of this text is that it was meant to be primarily, simply, felt, which is why I recommend simply swallowing this text.
This is a book about loss, first and foremost. It’s about the ways in which a family experiences separation through the generations, specifically orienting itself around the death of Oskar Schell’s father on 9/11. Through the eyes of young Oskar, his grandmother, and another character, we explore the city, hunting for…. well, I’ll let you find that out on your own. Without spoiling anything, it might be safe to say we’re hunting for a resolution to the boy’s grief over his father’s death.
This felt-experience of the characters was what I pointed my friend back to when I suggested he try the book again. In a book where the dialogue literally eats itself, and close to a quarter of the pages are in pictures, I’d suggest that a careful close reading of the text is simply not the point. Lean into the poetry of the work. Feel it, rather than read it. Experience the “heavy boots” of the characters and feel yourself wowed by each new turn of the tale.
Or rather, try to. Frankly, as I’m sitting here reflecting on this book, I’m realizing that I felt very little as I read it—a problem, especially if I’m arguing that the book’s entire point is to make the reader feel something.
Maybe this is a “me” problem. Maybe I’ve come full circle from my earlier days engulfed in too much grief to bear more, to now being engulfed in too many grief stories to care anymore; that is to say, perhaps I’m desensitized. After all, I’m writing a book on loss these days, and I’m finding that some desensitization is necessary for good self-care.
I’d be willing to go along with that reading if I hadn’t had an experience with a grief story this week that points to a different conclusion. While reading a collection of military stories of fallen soldiers, I found myself feeling similarly, sort of numb to the stories of funerals and death. But at some point in this book, I came across a story that shocked me out of my numbness to the point of tears. A widow, seven months pregnant, chose to sleep one more night next to her husband as he lay in his casket, and the Marines sent to attend his body stood watch over her that night. Something about the way she processed her grief and how tremendously helpful this action was to her healing process engaged emotion in me that I hadn’t felt prior to that point of the book (Final Salute by Jim Sheeler if you want to read more).
So why didn’t Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close surface anything for me? It felt like it should have. There was death, there was grief, there was separation, there was an emotionally-lost child experiencing what I’d call PTSD, plenty to resonate with and feel internally, especially since I can seriously, 100% empathize with that set of problems. The Guardian offers one solution for my experience, noting that Oskar puts an emotional distance between himself and his pain. Perhaps I was simply mirroring the character?
But I really don’t think so. I’ll take up that mirror metaphor and bend it a bit to see if I can illuminate what I mean.
This book is fragmented by its very nature. Shifting from character to character, photo to dialogue, color to black and white, French to English, it’s possible to imagine these bits as fragments of a broken mirror. Let’s say the author began to pick up these fragments with an intent to glue them back together to form some sort of usable whole. “I’ll take 9/11” he could have said, “and attach it to a precocious child” we can imagine he said next “and glue onto these centerpieces a deaf upstairs neighbor, a dead father, Manhattan, a kid-sized version of Hamlet, a mystery to solve, and Nazi Germany.” I imagine the author now grabbing a foam brush and a bucket of mod podge and sealing this bastardized mirror with a layer of gloss glue. He lays it carefully out on the table to let it dry, before hanging this sharp-edged, semi-reflective “art” piece on the wall to be admired.
And there’s exactly how I really felt about this book. The many disparate parts, meant to be woven together by through lines and emotional resonance, instead remained fragmented, obscured, and sharp. It’s as difficult to get hold of emotionally as a sculpture in a gallery you might stare at for a few moments to wonder only what the heck this piece is doing in the modern art museum. Further, the book functioned neither as a clear mirror through which to view oneself and one’s emotions, nor as an effective scrying glass through which to view another self with empathy. It only allowed itself to be observed, and the observation revealed… a bunch of sharp edges and glue.
Not to say that a book’s sole purpose is to be mirroring, but it must communicate something, right? This author’s purpose seemed to be to communicate essential truths about the human experience of loss through the lens of 9/11. Foer picked a crucial, emotionally-charged moment in history around which to arrange his narrative, possibly anticipating that doing so would invoke the effusively-present pathos of US citizenry surrounding the topic to generate sales. Particularly at the time of the book’s publication, it was a good marketing move, but I don’t think for one minute it was a good storytelling move. More bluntly, I think he failed at doing anything of real artistic substance with this work.
MANY people disagree with me. The public was entranced by the story, it made its way onto school reading lists all over the place, and as I understand, Emily loved it. So go read it. See for yourself what you think about this book, and let me know what you think in the comments.
THE RECOMMENDER IN REVIEW
This book is hard to read, and it’s so like Emily to have picked it up—not just one time in the past but again recently in preparation to talk with me about it (HINT: more on that later! Stay tuned!). Emily appreciates things that are a bit crusty, difficult to dig into, and out of her comfort zone. It takes a strong person to continually confront the hard and difficult things of life and to walk away from those experiences with an understanding that some kind of growth has been achieved in the process. Through the lens of this book, I see Emily’s strength in abundance.
WHERE TO FIND IT
Interabang books is my favorite place to shop locally in DFW. You can also order it from any online book retailer or find it used nearly anywhere used books are sold.
