Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
By Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95)
Grant Delin
The extremely talented Foer.
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Will this interesting (but flawed) second novel join its flawed (but interesting) predecessor, Everything Is Illuminated, on the list of literary smash hits, cementing the 28-year-old Foer's reputation? At minimum, Extremely Loud is more deftly executed than Everything Is Illuminated—the writing is stronger and more precise, and the characters more visceral. The story is pretty good, too, though it borrows a lot from the more original Illuminated. Both novels use dueling past-present narratives; both make heavy use of the epistolary form; and both feature a young hero in search of important familial truths. Here, it's 9-year-old Oskar Schell's quest to understand the loss of his father, Thomas, in the 9/11 attacks. After he finds a key stashed in his late father's closet, he resolves to scour New York for the matching lock—one of 162 million, he estimates. He begins by making house calls, starting at the beginning of the phone book. The impossibility of this pursuit never occurs to Oskar, who believes that when he finds the lock, the pain of his father's death will somehow be undone.
Oskar is engaging from the start, a precocious wisecracker. He writes incessantly to Weird Al Yankovic, Jane Goodall, and Dr. Stephen Hawking. He invents life-saving devices like the bird-seed shirt, in case you need to be airlifted from a burning building, and a microphone pill that, when swallowed, plays your heartbeat through little speakers. Oskar's curiosity and creative spirit—his joie de vivre—set up a tragic irony, since most of his energy is spent grappling with his father's death.
Oskar's relationship with his father is the novel's powerful imaginative center. In one flashback, Thomas tells Oskar the beautiful urban fable of the Sixth Borough, the lost island of New York City that floated away before Oskar was born. But Foer's virtuosity has deepened to include serious realism, too, as when Oskar accuses his mother (wrongly) of not having loved his father—dead two years now—and of dishonoring his memory by hanging out with her innocuous friend Ron.
Yet for all its good qualities, you can still feel the book straining to avoid being outshined by its own forebear. Its blustery title, use of 9/11 as a defining event, and nonstop textual and typographical acrobatics—some pages have only one sentence, others have none, still others slam together so many that the page turns black—do little more than trumpet the book's insecurities ("am I loud enough, smart enough, experimental enough?"). This bells-and-whistles approach is what gives literary experimentation a bad name. Anyone can mess around with white space.
Foer might've devoted some of that effort to plain old revision. The novel's supporting narrative—a lengthy series of letters written by Oskar's grandparents recounting their unhappy lives after fleeing World War II Germany—simply doesn't work at all. Their language is drab, unconvincing, and cliché-ridden ("if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently"), and their only qualities are negatives: lost family, muteness, blindness, and doubt. In the end, it's not clear what their story has added, other than about 100 pages.
Still, Oskar's comparatively lively voice is so entertaining that you don't mind plowing through the weaker sections to get back to it. It's too bad the book ends with a clunk. Foer goofs by substituting a potboiler finish for the metaphysics he's previously taken such pains to articulate—where loss remains a mystery without a logical solution. Presto! The turning of a key simply undoes the painful, murky enigma of death. Luckily, Oskar is there to save his creator yet again: It's not the mechanics of the novel you remember, but the resonant voice of its sad young narrator. DAVID SARNO
Jonathan Safran Foer will appear at Richard Hugo House (1634 11th Ave., 206-322-7030), 4 p.m. Thurs., April 21; and later that evening with local novelist Charles D'Amrosio at Chop Suey (1325 E. Madison St., 206- 324-8000; 21 and over), 8 p.m., followed by DJ and dancing.
A Hundred and One Days
By Åsne Seierstad (Perseus, $22.95)
Liberation, invasion, occupation— whatever you want to call it, the Iraq war has officially turned two. (Contain your ambivalence, please.) With the chaos, bloodshed, and occasional glimmers of hope have come more than a few books. Fortunately, a growing number of writers are kicking ideological axes to the curb in favor of comprehensive reporting. Jon Lee Anderson's The Fall of Baghdad comes to mind, as does Evan Wright's Generation Kill.
Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad's Days is a well-meant step in this direction. It privileges ordinary Iraqis to geopolitics; if the word "neoconservative" appears in these pages, it does so quietly. Seierstad (The Bookseller of Kabul) is a veteran war correspondent who cut her teeth in Chechnya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. She stayed in Baghdad from January of 2003 through May of that year corresponding for several Scandinavian newspapers and TV networks.
Seierstad's stated aim was to try and cover the war through basic muckraking: "to find dissidents, a secret uprising, gagged intellectuals . . . to point out human rights violations, expose oppression." Mostly she writes about how hard it is to report with a Baathist media minder in tow. In other contexts, this might seem like excessive shoptalk. And yet to witness how a regime suppresses truth and institutionalizes its falsehoods is to understand a dictatorship in all its paranoid and delusional glory.
