Further Musings

It’s late, much too late to be up even though we’re just back from central time but I just finished my second novel of the summer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Foer and I wanted to blog about it before I left its spell. There’s something about me that loves to read a novel that still has me aching 20 minutes after putting it down.  I picked it up at midnight and when I looked up 30 minutes later it was 2am.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a beautiful and aching story in which winds the love of a family winds around three terrible calamities.  The story, told by three different narrators, revolves around nine-year old Oskar Schell, his grandparents and their love story, and Oskar and his mother’s love for his father.  Oskar sets off on a peculiar quest around New York City: he has a key and name but cannot find the lock.

Foer’s imagination is as creative as the typesetting.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel but it blurs the line towards . . . towards art?  towards a graphic novel?  He violates the standard rules of the novel (black and white typeset only) in ways that show how full and in love and how empty and lonely the characters are.  He did a good job of easing me into his use of color and space in the format of the novel (though I have to confess at the first violation I thought some *&%^* student had defaced the book).  As the bright red ink wove between the lines in places I wondered about how the printing press confined the novel and why adult books (unlike children’s books) are largely devoid of illustrations and pictures.

It’s a beautiful, funny and sparkling story.  The characters and their love are beautiful and it’s aching for the pain the suffer.