Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a book about a boy genius, Oskar Schell, searching the boroughs of New York for a lock that fits a key left by his father who was killed in the 911 attacks.

But this book represents a challenge. Here is the thought process I went through in order to extract meaning from this incredibly complicated arrangement of literary devices:

Take one: It’s irritating to be pulled along through letters, improvised fonts and symbols, photos, eccentric characters, incredibly juxtaposed circumstances, and, at times, pure fantasy, just to be met with a contrived ending, which is to dump Grandpa’s life story into an empty coffin to give Dad a body..

Take two: It’s the story of sorrow and guilt. The nine-year-old genius is in sorrow because his hero father is dead and guilty because he didn’t answer his dad’s final phone call, thus missing a last “I love you”; Mom is in sorrow because she lost a husband, and she’s guilty because she cannot assuage the deep sadness of her son; Grandma is sorrowful about her truncated marriage and guilty that she never said a last “I love you” to her sister; Grandpa is a walking despondent, living a speechless, self-loathing life, and he’s incredibly guilty for not being there for his son, his wife, his grandson, and for all the people who died instead of him.

Take three: The kid made it all up. Kind of like the movie Sixth Sense where we don’t realize until the end that things aren’t as they appeared to be (or not be). After all, who, besides the reader, ever reads Grandma’s and Grandpa’s letters? And aren’t some of these characters seemingly out of the Looking Glass (Mr. Black, Ruth, Gerald)? In fact, most “shrug their shoulders” in the same way, and most possess the same peculiarities as the boy (Ruth’s husband “invents” a beam so his wife can see him!?). And there is no question Oskar has an incredibly overactive imagination.

Take four: There is a mental abnormality gene on Dad’s side. There is superior intelligence and/or talent coupled with some kind of obsessive compulsiveness: Grandpa’s a sculptor, but has “places” in the apartment; Dad’s a gifted and creative story teller, but couldn’t help but fastidiously circle errors in the Times; and Oskar is a genius who cannot control his incredibly active pursuit of finding ways his father could not have died.

Final take: It’s about the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) and that the worst losses in our lives are those when a child loses a parent and a parent loses a child. Oskar’s journey, which is real (because all the characters can be connected to Mom – who is real), is a cathartic adventure that has him accepting his father’s death at the end, as he is able to move on (allowing Mom to fall in love again); although we know this is not over for Oskar, because at the end he is still asking for time to be turned back. As is the reality with tragic losses of their parents, children take an incredibly long time to heal. 

Note: Trying to figure out how things related to each other in this book was, at times, like trying to decode Grandpa’s numbered text messages on pages 269-271. For example, pages 208-216 have red circles around words and punctuation, ostensibly to indicate errors; however, some red circles are around words and phrases that have no errors, and furthermore, there are considerable errors where there are no red circles. Also, why did Gerald tell Oskar his daughter liked cereal? Finally, the use of the words “extremely” and “incredibly” must mean something because Oskar uses them a lot, particularly when he meets new characters (I used the word “incredibly” in each of the above paragraphs just to spite Foer for placing this dilemma in his book).

UnBroken by Laura Hillenbrand

            Anyone reading this book will come away with a new perspective, as well as heightened knowledge, and above all, an appreciation for what soldiers go through in a war, particularly WWII.  Laura Hillenbrand provides a perspective of this war, with immense help from a bare-knuckle, honest accounting from Louie Zamperini and other prisoners of war. To finally close the cover of this book, was, for me, to believe I had witnessed the furthest extent of what the human body could endure and the horrid extreme of cruelty a human being could deliver.

            This book, for me, began when the Green Hornet crashed in the Pacific and the three men struggled to survive. It is incomprehensible how the men repeatedly went for stretches of eight or more days without food and very little potable water. Tracking their will to survive and their determination against increasing obstacles became riveting. Hillenbrand’s description of the withering of their bodies, the sores all over them, and their swollen lips, painted a picture of decomposing flesh, rotting slowly before my eyes.     

             Their oversight of life-saving techniques, such as first overlooking the use of canvas sacks as rain-catchers, gave them the quality of being one of us, regular people, but with a little added survival training. Because this story is non-fiction, Hillenbrand was left with the characters she had and the detailed accounts they gave, which has meticulously chronicled page-by-page in her end of the book notes. So there were no McGyvers to save the day.

            That they survived the ocean, beating back sharks that conspiratorially badgered them into death at sea, was incredible, and record-setting, but it also, for me, illustrated the stamina of the human will to live. Death would have mercifully ended the pain.

            And after being captured and discarded into prison camps, Louie endured continual starvation, beatings, assaults on his dignity, and mental torture that made him wish he had died at sea. Then, when his body and mind could take no more, in the midst of perpetual, unrelenting torment from prison guards, a high ranking guard, The Bird, made Louie his personal punching bag (and that is euphemistically put). He beat him morning noon and night, at one point had other POWs punch him 220 times until he blacked out, withheld food for weeks, threatened to drown him, and actually even made him eat shit.

            That this is a true story of an Olympic athlete, who could have made history on a track but didn’t because of his service in the military, is what initially made this a story to publish; however, Hillenbrand uses this starting block to launch into the unspeakable details of what war is really about.

            Sure, with the exception of Louie, the character development could have been better. Most people, even Phil, seemed generic stand-ins to move the “Unbroken” plot along. This is, perhaps, why at times the first two parts lagged a bit. I would have preferred those 121 pages condensed to about 60, with less about every loaf of bread stolen and every plane mission flown.

            But as the book progressed, the food thieving skill did help to add humor to an otherwise gravely serious tale; for example, when the POWs, in an almost Hogan’s Heroes-like style, stole food and newspapers, it made their captors look like fools.

            Also, the contributions she received from Louie and others to write this book were essential, and without detailed letters, diaries, and government records, this important story could not be told. The haunting picture of Louie on page 336, for example, indeed, tells one thousand words.

            Lastly, truth gave the author the denouement she needed in order to end this upon the unbroken theme she began: Louie’s transformation to Christianity was what brought him out of an abysmal dissension and into a life that built tremendous success out of an absolute hell. There is no other reason given for his reemergence and for those who would discount this, I guess, are challenged to do eight years of painstaking and tedious research to find another reason. I give this book eight stars.

Saints at the River by Ron Rash

Tight. The author interwove two past sub-stories (the burning of the kids and the car accident killing Allen’s family) with the current romance and the main story of the kid in the river. This was my kind of book: in each chapter he built suspensively to all the plots and still made the stories mean something -- and he did it all in 237 pages. All plots included the theme of redemption: Allen wanting to assuage the guilt of being an absent father; Maggie and her dad both needing to reconcile the past; and the dead girl’s father trying to make up for his inability to save his daughter. In the end, no one got what he or she wanted. By the time the bodies surfaced after the dynamiting, Allen’s displacement of his own daughter’s death and Herb’s will to get the body were squashed by the death of Randy and the dysfunctional dam. Maggie’s reconciliation was by her own acknowledgement, “maybe as much as we were capable of.” But Rash’s message, I think, is that life does not have happy endings, and each time there seems to be one, new problems are spawned because we are humans and humans have a hard time getting out of their own way. Not lost here is the religious message and that is centered on Luke. All kinds of food for thought here: “Luke” is an author in the Bible and he is also a medical doctor (or healer). I think of the Hippocratic Oath, to do no harm, which was Luke’s mission toward the environment. Luke, like the loyal disciple, also makes it clear he will die for the river; a river which has supernatural powers (and definitely can decide who lives and who dies). I think he is one of the “Saints” at the River (he is even described by Maggie in the scene where he almost drowns as “beatific.”) He doggedly defends the “God” he believes in (the river) and in the end will give his life, swimming to stop Ronny from damaging the river. But after the congregation prays for Randy to be resurrected, it is Ronny who frees the bodies, but the irony is he is no savior, but just another example of the flaws in mankind. Seemingly left open is what punishment is dealt to Ronny, but I think it’s obvious: there is no punishment. A precedent has been established, the bulldozer has come, the rocks drilled, and now devastation by explosion. Luke’s domino theory has begun. On Rash’s writing: another reason this book fit my comfort zone was that he succeeded in his description and narrative with simple, but concise language. One example was when Maggie described a family dinner when Ben first came home from the hospital: “every question and answer was in syllables, not sentences.” Lastly, on page 2 when I learned the narrator was going to be a woman, I thought of Jack Nicholson’s character in “As Good as it Gets.” an OCD author who was asked how he writes women so well. His response was that he thinks of a man and then takes away reason and accountability. I was glad Maggie did indeed possess both these qualities and more. But this does lead to the one negative comment I have about the book: I don’t think the romance was that well developed because I could never really feel any “heat” between them. But perhaps Rash was trying to say that a book was like a camera in that there is always more that lies outside its framed mechanical truth. Perhaps, too, then, he was trying to say something about himself when he named the dynamiter after himself. Thanks for letting me ramble – I give this book a 9.

After Long Silence by Helen Fremont

The overarching point about this book is one that has been said before: this story cannot be told enough times. That is, the Nazi Holocaust remains the pre-eminent example of the results of racist actions and speech in a society, and most in a civilized society agree that a people reaching these depths of brutality are destined for self-destruction and, well, Hell. Most surely, there is another book out there that chronicles the Holocaust and most likely one that would mention similar stories and details of actual gruesome events. So, although I’ve read historical accounts and watched the countless television documentaries, I have not been exposed to enough, and After Long Silence succeeds in delineating circumstances that further educate and illuminate. That being said, most other aspects of the book fall short, and seem like patches inserted to hold the book together rather than tell a story, which it purports to do. Although I’ll never forget some scenes, such as author Helen Fremont’s account of her mother and Zosia evading the massacre in their hometown and the ordeals of her father in a Siberian prison camp, the “true” story does not pull things together in an organized fluid manner. Instead, events are put together like scraps of information, loosely organized like a collage, with the hope that the reader can complete the story by melting it all together at the end. The time between her father being taken captive and her mother being separated, for example, does not adequately answer a key question: Why would she continue to wait for him when she is not really sure he is dead or alive? And, although the “love” story of the two was described briefly, it does not show how a commitment of the two would be so strong as to chew up seven years of youth (even though punctuated by traumatic events) . And why does Louis risk so much? Why didn’t she marry him? The answers to my questions, I believe, lie in the first pages of the book when Fremont states that the “true” story contains some “imagined” events. Rarely though do we know which are made up and which are not. So what is true? Furthermore, both her parents disapproved of the book, which, therefore, lends to more suspicion that there are inaccuracies. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give this a 5.

Patrimony by Phillip Roth

Phillip Roth has four main topics to deal with in Patrimony and they are all about being Jewish, except, ironically, there is very little religion (as being Jewish is a religious connection to Abraham) in the book, and most of the characters seem disinterested in religion. The four topics Roth covers are the dying of his father, the Jewish-ness of his father, the holocaust, and discrimination of the Jews in the US.

What this book is primarily about is the chronicling of the last months of the life of Herman Roth, Phillip’s father. For this, Roth gives insight into a man who has stubbornly gone after a full life throughout his 87 years of existence, and even in the bleakest diagnosis of a deadly brain tumor, he still asks for “a couple of more years.” It includes the doctors visits, the rapid physical deterioration of Herman’s body, and the anguish of a son watching a loved parent go down hill.

Although these insights are interesting and thought-provoking, there are just not enough of them. It is said that writers work because they can tell the story better than the rest of us. So the question becomes, do I need Roth to tell this story? The answer here is no. It is a fact of life that most people deal with the death of a loved one; as people get older the chances are greater they will watch their parents die and probably suffer too. So most of what Roth told us we already know about the dying elderly: the irritability with life, the denial of mortality, and the loss of bodily functions such as when Herman ‘beshat himself.”

His attempts to give an honest portrayal, letting the reader know Herman was not kind to his wives was not effective; for most people this verbal abuse trumps even the finest of other character traits. I checked out myself about then.

As for the Jewish-ness, that was dealt with mostly with depictions of Jews who were hard scrabble businessmen who made good, and one of the themes of the book, remembering, was illustrated as Herman remarkably recanted the locations and names of long-ago businesses and businessmen.

Roth seemed to throw in the topic of discrimination of insurance employees by Metropolitan Life, as he admits it is a retelling from another book he wrote. It seemed he was trying to make a page-count.

Lastly, his dealing with the holocaust and concentration camp survivor Walter Herrmann seemed to be a tag-on in order to get in two signature elements Roth is known for, humor and pornography, and also to add to the page-count. It seemed strange that this German Ron Jeremy, someone having difficulty with English, could translate with perfect grammatical clarity.

In this book, Roth manages to accomplish much though. He has paid tribute to his father; brought attention to holocaust survivors and discriminated Jews in the US; and probably most of all showed the savvy of Jews in business, for after realizing that he got fourteen bucks off me for this book I almost beshat myself.