Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Starred review from January 31, 2005
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review.

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE
Jonathan Safran Foer
. Houghton Mifflin
, $24.95 (368p) ISBN 0-618-32970-6

Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated
, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated
, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated
was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's "charring effect." It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty. Agent, Nicole Aragi. 11-city author tour; foreign rights sold in 12 countries.

This clever and moving novel of interconnected stories is told--and narrated--in three voices: Jeff Woodman is Oskar Schell, from whose perspective the majority of the story is told; Richard Ferrone is his grandfather, Thomas; and Barbara Caruso is his grandmother. The three-voice performance is very effective, but Jeff Woodman is the standout, utterly convincing as precocious 9-year-old Oskar, who is searching for answers about his father's death in the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. The novel is alternately harrowing and hilarious, as much a meditation on life and loss as a collective biography of the individuals who make up New York City. Compelling listening. J.M.D. 2006 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine