Foer, Johnathan Safran - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Right now, I’m listening to a song called “How It Ends” by a band called Devotchka. I know about this song because it is played on trailers for the upcoming film, Everything Is Illuminated, a film based off of the best book I’ve read in the last five years. The author of Everything Is Illuminated is a guy named Johnathan Safran Foer, who was in his early 20’s when he wrote the book.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is Foer’s sophomore effort, an ambitious fictional account of a boy who’s father was killed in the World Trade Center attacks. Nine year-old Oskar Schell undertakes a search across the five boroughs of New York City in search of a lock that he hopes to open with a key that he believes belonged to his father.

Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers, two of Foer’s peers in a new generation of writers, struggled with their second novels. Partly, this was due to the fact that the hype of their first novels would be difficult for anyone to reproduce. Another reason was that Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Smith’s White Teeth, like Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, are either personal or appear that way.

Extremely Loud is very similar to Illuminated. Both protagonists are young and closely entwined to the generations before them. Both are searching for links to lost members of their families. In both novels, Foer uses format tricks to emphasize story points.

While Foer has received criticism for these tricks, they take the art of writing beyond the literal meaning of the words. Oskar recalls his father reading the newspaper and circling errors, so some pages feature words circled hastily in bright red ink. On other pages, the type begins to get closer and closer near the bottom of the page until the final lines are black and unreadable. Foer writes with such detail and beauty that it’s easy to imagine that the black lines contain some of his most poetic words.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is also one of the first pieces of literature to explore the effects of September 11th from a fictional standpoint. Foer writes Oskar’s grief well, touching for brief and heart-wrenching moments on his anger.

Even in company with Eggers and Smith, Johnathan Safran Foer may be the best young writer alive. That being said, Extremely Loud is not his finest work, and I think the disconnect is that Everything is Illuminated seems like a labor of love, a creation that was meticulously cared for and structured. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, on the other hand, seems like a novel.

Johnathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: B-

Jordan Green wishes that he had the focus to write even a “freshman effort”, and feels vaguely guilty criticizing (even slightly) a writer that he considers to be America’s next literary genius.

Posted on October 4, 2005 12:37 PM