A series of curious incidents

Week 51: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer
Recommended by: Kirsty Stanfield

Writing about Big Historic Events is a bit of a minefield. Does the author have something to say about the event itself, are they trying to exorcise some of their own demons of the event by writing about it, is it simply a useful crutch to hang a story on? For Jonathan Safran Foer, writing about one – the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center – isn't enough, the fire bombing of Dresden is also thrown in. Or rather carefully placed in, because the trauma of the earlier event is a trigger and explanation for a lot of the family history and the background noise that results in the situation running through the novel's present.

Which is perhaps a very odd place to come at the book from. In it's simplest form, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a quest: precocious nine-year old Oskar discovers a key in his father's closet, two years after he died during the World Trade Center attacks, and sets out to discover what it opens. This serves as both a literal and metaphorical quest with Oskar and his mother both looking for some closure after the event. There is a lot more complexity to things than this though, for interwoven in the main story are the tales of Oskar's grandmother and grandfather, their own idiosyncratic lives, and as these yarns unravel, we see how earlier trauma has left some deep scars.

What could be a psychologically heavy book – and I found these some of the secondary narratives, if that isn't too dismissive of them, to be hard work – is fortunately leavened by Oskar, who is a creation of pure joy. Oskar is the kind of high-functioning dysfunctional nine-year who is capable of brining unintended humour into any number of situations through the time-homoured disjunction of knowledge but lack of understanding. He's an inventor, a collector, an entrepreneur and his first person narration gives insight into many things beyond his years and his naive, highly-strung, cyncically-tinged romantic world view.

Equally, he serves as a conduit for anyone coping with loss and grief through his emotional openness with the reader and his choice of language that illustrates how we dress up things that we can't talk about or don't know how to talk about. Oskar's term of 'heavy boots' for his depression mirrors similar terms such as 'under a cloud' or 'black dog' that mean we skirt around issues that could expose or embarrass either ourselves or other people. He is therefore a splendid cross between Mark Haddon's Christopher from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and J.D. Salinger's gifted but brittle Glass family.

As the narrative strands combine, we dig up the family history and watch as Oskar hot foots it around New York, coming into contact with a sizeable support cast of bit-part players and character actors. Ultimately though, it's the journey that's more important than the end result and that is one of the book's key themes, though boiling it down to that feels like it sells it rather short. On top of that, Safran Foer plays around with form within the book, interspersing images (mostly from Oskar's scrapbook), as well as typewritten letters and the kind of red ringing of words that would send Sherlock Homes' brain into overdrive. Now I ain't no literary critic and I'm not sure if it adds extra heft and depth or merely pretension into the mix, but it's innovative and I can't fault it for that.

It strikes the right balance between heart-felt, moving, wise, funny and sombre; the levity needed to puntuate the subject matter as well as to deliver parts of it, and it doesn't lapse into schmaltz. This is always a fear when dealing with human beings and emotional battles, especially when set against a backdrop of something now so deeply ingrained and mythologised in the American psyche it may come out Hollywoodised: a lot less subtle, a few more emotional haymakers thrown in, and finishes up cheerful and teary and looking like someone vomited forth a month-long diet of the Stars and Stripes. It's a better book than that, though: smarter, sadder, and confirms Safran Foer as a writer of no small talent.