Oskar's travels bring the novel its great momentum and wit, but it is a second story line, the epistolary tale of Oskar's grandparents—a mute sculptor and his sometime muse, both of whom survived the World War II bombing of Dresden—that gives the tale its heart … Through the powerful linkage of historical explosions, from Dresden to Nagasaki to the Twin Towers, framed in a universe that is itself slowly exploding, Foer's imagery begins to roil with the mythopoetic physics of a rabbinic fairy tale … Impressively, the book's bells and whistles actually feel appropriate to its larger meaning, rather than coming across as mere gimmickry. How many ways, in how many mediums, Foer seems to be asking, can we miss each other?
Despite the dramatically contemporary subject of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer hasn't invented something new as much as shifted the plot of his spectacularly successful Everything Is Illuminated … Journeys like this are dangerous – a little boy could get mugged; an author could get mawkish – but Foer is an extraordinarily sensitive writer, and Oskar's search for a missing parent scratches one of our first anxieties … This novel and his first one effectively trace the smoke from one horror to the next, from New York to Dresden to Hiroshima to the gulag – to every baffled survivor whose happiness was burned away by conflations of politics and hatred that were entirely irrelevant to his life.
The danger that Foer is braving here is the ease with which the work could have slipped into the exploitative and sentimental. The novel could have come off as crass and too clever for its own good. Or worse, reading this novel could have been painfully insulting and cruel … Placing the weight of Sept. 11 on the narrow shoulders of a young boy allows Foer to sidestep the politics of the event and focus completely on the emotional toll … Oskar, as precocious as he may be, is an amplified heartbeat of a character. Through him, Foer's incredibly moving novel rescues the victims from becoming objects, and in turn, it rescues the survivors as well.
This novel explores the nature of grief and the difficulty of human connection through the prism of 9/11 and the World War II firebombing of Dresden. While it contains moments of shattering emotion and stunning virtuosity that attest to Mr. Foer's myriad gifts as a writer, the novel as a whole feels simultaneously contrived and improvisatory, schematic and haphazard … Mr. Foer appears to want his tale to inhabit a limbo land located somewhere just beyond the world as we know it...There is something precious and forced about such scenarios, as though Mr. Foer were trying to sprinkle handfuls of Gabriel García Márquez's magical realism into his story without really understanding this sleight of hand … Clearly Mr. Foer has used these techniques as writers in Latin America and Eastern Europe have used them to try to get traction on horrific events that defy both reason and conventional narrative approaches, but all too often his execution verges on the whimsical rather than the galvanic or persuasive.
Oskar Schell is the 9-year-old New Yorker whose motormouth drives Foer's story. He's a cross between J. D. Salinger's precocious, morbid, psychiatry-proof child philosophers and all those daunting city kids from children's books … A conscious homage to the Gotham wise-child genre, the book features several beloved stock characters, down to the nice doorman and other service folk who help their upper-middle-class young wards get around the urban jungle safely … Once they've cracked open this overstuffed fortune cookie and pondered the symmetries, allusions and truths on the tightly coiled strip of paper, it will dawn on some readers that today's neo-experimental novels are not necessarily any better suited to get inside, or around, today's realities than your average Hardy Boys mystery.
The novel is dominated by the voice of Oskar. Unlike the sardonic, funny, wised-up narrator of Grass’s The Tin Drum, this Oskar is a genuinely annoying nine-year-old … The ways in which a nine-year-old might threaten the adult world with his unrestrained ego are all hemmed in, controlled, and all the people are nice, and all a little sad and lonely. The skepticism and satire that marked the best parts of Everything Is Illuminated are nowhere in evidence here … The effect of the book as a whole is in fact precisely to pull the September 11 attacks out of history—at the very moment when history has been here for a while now.
This reader’s heart slightly sank when he realized that he was going to spend more than three hundred pages in the company of an unhappy, partially wised-up nine-year-old … This reader’s mind was boggled, too, by a nine-year-old boy’s being allowed to roam, every weekend, all over the five boroughs, inquiring, in alphabetical order, at the two hundred and sixteen different addresses listed in the phone book under the name ‘Black’ … The book’s graphic embellishments reach a climax in the last pages, when the flip-the-pages device present in some children’s books answers Oskar’s yearning that everything be run backward—a fall is turned into an ascent. It is one of the most curious happy endings ever contrived, and unexpectedly moving.
It’s fair to say that Oskar’s brain is unusually sharp for a nine-year-old, but, as he says, he started inventing things to ‘dull’ it to take his mind off what he otherwise can’t stop thinking about: ‘I thought about the falling body’ … Once you get past some sloppy stage-setting and the unlikeliness of Oskar’s quest (which, it turns out, was less a matter of improbability than, in a storytelling miscue, Foer’s withholding too much for too long) the novel earns your trust. Whereas Everything Is Illuminated grows more ponderous and preposterous, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close improves and deepens. The imaginative terrain it rests on, and to which Foer is staking a maturing claim, is a place where fact can make room for fiction, and fiction accommodate fact.
Foer’s second and latest novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, shows that he hasn’t lost his taste for naïve or otherwise unreliable narrators … It may just be too early to get cute in writing about September 11; on the other hand, there’s never a good time to get as cute as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close get … Oskar resembles nothing so much as a plastic bag crammed with oddities. For every eccentricity that makes psychological sense—fear of public transportation or an overly clinical interest in the bombing of Hiroshima, for example—there’s another that’s just piled on … Choosing a child narrator gives Foer access to extravagant emotions and quirky imaginings that would seem cloying or self-indulgent in a grown-up, but at the cost of allowing the central trauma its due.
Oskar sounds like a sweet preschooler and a pompous college student at the same time—which is to say that he never seems human for a moment. Though eager to impress us with the lad's imagination, Foer can think of nothing better than to offer page after page of whimsical ideas for innovations … The remarkable thing is that a substantial part of the book is designed to be only glanced at. If this is a new trend in ‘alternative’ fiction, I would like to see it encouraged … After a while the gimmickry starts to remind one of a clown frantically yanking toys out of his sack: a fatal image. This book may occasion talk of sophomore jinxes, but if anything, Extremely Loud is a bolder and more historically significant novel than its predecessor.
The boy's hobbies and interests are imaginative and colorfully described. But they have the effect of making us think Oskar is either older, or else an unreasonable invention. Nine he is not … What seem authentically 9 are Oskar's fears of things like suspension bridges, germs and fireworks, and his conversations much later in the book, along with some refreshingly unadorned observations … Foer might have done better to move sooner from the merely comic – it gives the illusion that he's rising above sentimentality when the opposite is true. What's needed is New York, and a believable child, a family in ruins, finding strength.
Foer is going for some kind of magic realism here, but he's failed to register that magic realism works best when it cuts to the quick of a hard reality … Another move — Oskar giving a brutally graphic schoolroom presentation on the 1945 Hiroshima bombing — brings the novel perilously close to atrocity-hopping. All through the book, as if to temper the effect of the horrors he mentions, Foer throws in illustrations and typographical tricks (red-ink circlings of deliberate typos, a gradual reduction of text-leading until the page is solid black). The result, too often, is reader bafflement and indifference … The general impression one gets here is of a young writer who wants desperately to have something important to say, and wants to say it in the most unusual way possible.
To a child with the overnourished intelligence and jittery nerve ends of a Maurice Sendak character comes a double invasion of Wild Things … Touching as some might be, inventions recur nonstop as he visits Blacks all over New York … The search goes on for eight months, gradually flagging as Oskar's peculiar hyperactive form of mourning works itself out … Foer took a risk in using a 9-year-old as the voice of this ambitious and in some ways impressive book. Children can personify tragedy, but perhaps they cannot speak it, at least in a sustained way. Oskar's precocious piping over the abyss is ultimately a sentimental, not a transfiguring, irony. Tragedy doesn't seek pity and terror; it arouses it.
