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April 22, 2005
A hyperkinetic kind of genius
Wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer does it again with brilliant new
novel.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
He may not be a doctor, but Jonathan Safran Foer has doubtless
made his mother proud. Not yet 30 years old, the New Yorker has
already authored three books – one of which, Everything
is Illuminated, he began while finishing his philosophy degree
at Princeton. It won him a clutch of honors, including the National
Jewish Book Award. A movie version is due out this summer. Foer's
new novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was one of
the most hotly anticipated fiction titles of the spring season.
It tells the story of a prodigious – and precocious –
nine-year-old, Oskar Schell, whose interpretation of life is wholly
colored by his father's death in the World Trade Centre. Oskar's
obsessions include bugs, drums, French words and the songs of the
Beatles – descriptors outlined on his business card. A solitary
child, he is also an inventor, at least in his mind's eye, of items
like teakettles that sing the chorus of "Yellow Submarine,"
digestible microphones that play heartbeats like sonar, a birdseed
vest, subway turnstiles that also serve as radiation detectors and
incredibly long ambulances that connect every building to a hospital.
In a post-9/11 world, Oskar's imaginings are perhaps the kind we
all secretly share – but in Foer's hands they are deftly and
touchingly woven into the inner life of a child. The book moves
at a rather breathless pace and is filled with the sort of peripatetic
dialogue you would imagine coming from a nine-year-old. Oskar moves
rapidly from a fear of death to his correspondence with famous scientists
to the problems he faces in a classroom peopled by bullies suffering
from attention deficit disorder (for which reason the school's production
of Hamlet must be edited into a modernized, bite-sized version).
In Everything is Illuminated, Foer jumped between the voices
of his namesake protagonist (a young New Yorker searching for the
truth about his grandfather in Ukraine), a translator named Alex
whose speech is studded with malapropisms and the fictional Jonathan
Safran Foer's shtetl-dwelling ancestors. He manages the same feat
in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, in which Oskar's
musings are juxtaposed with those of his isolated grandmother and
a grandfather whose power of speech has been so decimated that he
has the words "yes" and "no" tattooed on his
palms for ease of communication. Like Everything is Illuminated,
the new novel is also interleafed with graphic imagery, in this
case a series of black-and-white photographs that serve to illustrate
his characters' mindsets: doorknobs, keyholes, birds in flight,
buildings, bridges, rollercoasters.
Not long after his father's death, Oskar finds a mysterious key
inside a vase. He becomes driven to discover who the key belongs
to and what it might open. His quest takes him in a voyage across
New York City, to interview – alphabetically – everyone
with the last name that was written on the envelope containing the
key. It's a device that allows Foer – through the eyes of Oskar
and his grandparents – to examine the nature of fear, discovery
and the long arm of history.
Oskar's grandfather carries a notebook full of not only common phrases
but confessions to the son he left behind – a son who died
in a firestorm just as his sweetheart perished in the blazes of
Dresden half a century earlier. He and his wife live in an apartment
demarcated by "something places" and "nothing places,"
unable to commune because of their sad shared past.
Oskar's own heartbreaking journey, meanwhile, is riddled with loopy
characters, like the 103-year-old war reporter who maintains a catalogue
of one-word biographies, all punctuated with exclamation marks:
"Henry Kissinger: war! Ornette Coleman: music! Tom Cruise:
money! Mahatma Gandhi: war!" "But he was a pacificist,"
says Oskar. "Right! War!'
This is reflective fiction interrupted by riotous humor – a
great gift in a writer. But Foer has deflected comparisons to similarly
championed novelists: Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, even one of
his own favorites, Philip Roth. His perspective and style, his way
of flitting between a mind-boggling array of ideas and images, come
from the viewpoint of a different generation, he told interviewer
Robert Birnbaum in 2003: "[I was raised with] music, for example,
that depends very much on borrowing from different traditions, sampling
pieces of other music and overlaying different rhythms and melodies
and I think that is reflected in my writing. The world is more of
a collage every day."
That doesn't mean this novel is suited only to hip twenty-somethings
raised in the Internet age, though. Its broad-ranging appeal comes
from a deep sense of humanity and a skilful, stunningly worded sense
of universal themes: love, loss and, ultimately, hope.
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