Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

 EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE - JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Nobody talks of 9/11 these days. It's never mentioned. Not that it should be on the tip of everyone's tongue of course but it's just funny how an event of such magnitude, of such historic, global impact has now practically faded from memory, only remembered on its anniversary and then only by a now limited number of people. Do people still remember where they were at the time in the same way as in when John F Kennedy died? John who? 9/11 changed everything, so it's said. It was Tony Blair's finest moment even, with his 'the kaleidoscope has been shaken' speech though it was also all downhill for him from there on.

I was in New York shortly after 9/11 and obviously I went along to Ground Zero just to see it with my own eyes. We'd all seen the pictures, we'd all seen the footage but it was only when face to face with it did I truly recognize and understand the sheer, immense scale of it. New York is impressive anyway, where the streets are like canyons but for there to be a devastated hole where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood was mind-boggling. It was like looking upon something that shouldn't be, that wasn't possible - but there it was. And that was the paradox: it was a sight to behold because there was nothing there - there was nothing there, which made it a sight to behold. On trying to comprehend what was essentially the incomprehensible it suddenly dawned on me that I'd never actually considered the noise that the towers collapsing would have made. How loud exactly was that noise? Was it a boom, was it a rumble, and how long did it last?

Millions upon millions of words have been written about 9/11 but Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was one of the first to write about it in novel form and at the time it was a pretty brave thing to do. It was an obvious subject to write about but to Americans at least it was still a raw and emotive subject. On the other hand, perhaps the only way to come to terms with reality is to turn it into fiction? Who knows?

Foer's book is a novel but at the same time it's more than that. It's bricolage. It's a scrapbook of differing styles of writing, of photographs, design and experimentation. It's wordplay. It's a mean feat. A quite astonishing accomplishment in its own way. It's all about a nine-year old boy by the name of Oskar who has lost his father in 9/11, 'lost' being the relevant word because like so many others his body was never found. Though it's never explicitly stated, Oskar has autism so is somewhat different from all other children and indeed somewhat different from all other people. He's a precocious genius, at odds with everything and against the grain. Already finding it hard if not near impossible to function 'normally' in the world, 9/11 and the death of his father compounds it further.

Is Oskar a metaphor for America? Probably not but it's an interesting notion. Could not America's reaction to 9/11 as in lashing out at Afghanistan - bombing an already primitive country back to the Stone Age - be construed as the illogical/logical action of an autistic child? Those scenes of President Bush at the bomb site wreckage of Ground Zero, posing there for the cameras with an idiot grin on his face as Rescue Workers around him chanted 'USA! USA!' like at a ball game. Is that the actions of responsible adults? Posing for the cameras on top of what in effect was a mass graveyard?

Until someone is diagnosed as such, would they even know they might be autistic? And when someone is diagnosed as having autism does it come somewhat as a relief because it's an explanation as to why they always felt there was something not quite right with them? Did Jonathan Safran Foer know he was writing about a child with autism or was he writing about a character who he viewed as simply being an idiot savant - a precocious child genius? Does Foer have autism himself, I wonder? Do all Americans? Did they once know but have now forgotten? Just as they now seem to have forgotten about 9/11? The United States of Amnesia. The United States of Autism. Who knows?

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is all about searching for clues and searching for answers. Oskar spends all his time making sense of the world by using the most elaborate means and when his Dad is killed it tips him over into doubling down on that sense making. When he finds an old key that had belonged to his father he assumes that whatever it unlocks will hold all the answers he's searching for so he sets off on a quest through the six boroughs of New York, which seeing as there are only actually five boroughs introduces a sense of magic realism into the story. It's a thankless task, with Oskar encountering all manner of New Yorkers each with their own stories going on.

I wouldn't want to make light of 9/11 because a lot of people died that day and with the war on Afghanistan, a lot more people died later. Making light of it is, however, a criticism that could be levelled at Foer's book due to him being overly sentimental and cloying at the heart strings to such an extent that it ends up being annoying and rather than feeling sorry for the Oskar character, you end up almost disliking him.

Is it mere coincidence that Oskar shares the same name as the child protagonist in Gunter Grass's classic novel The Tin Drum? Probably not though whether it's intentional or a subliminal influence is something only Foer would know. At the end of the book, is the use of the series of photos of 'The Falling Man' (the person captured on camera as he fell from the Twin Towers) that when the pages are quickly flicked over make him appear to be floating upwards a nod to the Russian war film Come And See where at the end footage is played backwards and in so doing reverses World War Two? Probably, but again only Foer would know.

Does Oskar find any answers in the end? Well, not exactly. He finds out what the key is for but it's of no personal use to him but in the process and as a result of his quest he ends up finding himself. Which is probably a lot more that can be said about America.

John Serpico