Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a book about a boy genius, Oskar Schell, searching the boroughs of New York
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).
