In the wake of September 11, 2001, the anticipated slew of quick paraphernalia and literature was respectfully, or perhaps conveniently, limited.  After all, how do you begin to convey the emotional effects of September 11, 2001?  Do you make a video documentary?  Do you write it down, bind it?  Do you paint it?  Are you even supposed to try?

How do you describe how Oskar feels as a young boy who has lost his father?  Will a list of identities and emotions do?  

            Will a novel do?

Jonathan Safran Foer deals with this immense topic in his newest novel, which explores a deconstructionist philosophy popular among new writers.  Imperfect words just aren’t enough – so throw in whatever the hell else counts as writing.  Devoid of the mystical shtetls and oy gevalts of his first novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close contains photographs, colored ink, blank pages, one-sentence pages, and a gut-wrenching, cheap-shop flip book at its end.  If he could have, Foer might have used electronic pages, complete with pop-up textures, and virtual reality. 

             Whether Foer is bored with conventional rhetoric or just unable to create it, critics accuse him of the latter.  But the question remains: how do you go about describing the anger, madness, and loss after an event as dramatic as the destruction of the World Trade Center? 

Oskar spends much of his time throwing around different solutions to this problem. As he sleuths his way through New York, trying to find the owner of a mysterious key left behind by his deceased father, he tries to make sense of why his father died and – whether he is conscious of it or not –  why he feels the way he does.  He daydreams about special shower water that would cause his skin color to change according to his mood.  He invents a book that contains every word in every language. “You could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.”  He thinks up ambulances with electronic signs that automatically spell out the last thoughts of a dying patient. 

This sort of emotional autism is inherited from his grandfather, a mute, and a survivor of the Dresden bombings of World War II.  Oskar’s grandfather exists in the book through letters, sprinkled in between Oskar’s journey.  He writes about his attempt to make a telephone call. “I broke my life down into letters, for love I pressed ‘5,6,8,3’ for death, ‘3,3,2,8,4,’ when the suffering is subtracted from the joy, what remains?  What, I wondered, is the sum of the life? “6,9,6,2,6,3,4….”  The numbers go on for a full, desperate, two pages.  The implicit question: can life be quantified?  And are words any different?  Oskar’s grandfather’s letters often run over fifteen pages, yet it still isn’t enough, and he keeps “running out of room.”  The lines on the page literally get closer and closer together, until the words are an illegible black scribble.  

            Okay, so maybe it’s a bit annoying, and we get the point.  Yet it is precisely Oskar and his grandfather's inability to express themselves properly that makes their stories more poignant, more agonizing.  With the same virtuosity that swelled in his first novel, Foer elicits a cathartic spew of emotions, in whatever way is appropriate. With Oskar, it’s writing in all caps.  It’s obsessively mulling over his last words to his father.  “‘Dad?’ ‘Yeah buddy?’ ‘Nothing.’”  For Oskar’s grandfather, it’s using note cards (one-word pages) and recycling phrases like, “And I wouldn’t say no to something sweet,” and “I’m sorry.”  Forget for a moment that Foer uses fill-in-the-blank passages, photo illustrations, and flip books, or anything else that some would consider cheating.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close feels like what the title suggests – it makes you laugh, squint, and grimace.  By the end, I was moved to tears when I learned that Oskar could have talked to his father one last time before he died – but was frozen in front of the answering machine, unable to find words, unable to pick up just before the towers went down. 

            Foer’s attempt is both earnest and courageous, showing that more isn’t necessarily less.  This makes him every young writer’s champion; he avoids straight prose, employs gimmicks for cheap, doodles on the page, and all the while succeeds tremendously.  And if you’re not a believer in Foer’s new inventions, Oskar’s colored water invention is something to consider:  “It would be a good invention...[because] many times…you know you’re feeling a lot of something, but you don’t know what that something is…But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I’m happy! That whole time I was actually happy! What a relief!”  If there is a more brutally honest, earnest, and moving attempt at harnessing the emotions and the realities of September 11, I have yet to see it.