Jonathan Safran-Foer took a risk. In his second novel, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Safran-Foer opens wounds that few authors would be willing to touch, especially in the form of a fictional novel. Through 28-year-old Safran-Foer's creativity and brilliant imagination, readers see the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks through the eyes of 9-year-old Oskar Schell. The plot follows Oskar through the boroughs of New York as he searches for the lock that fits a key that once belonged to his father, Thomas, who died in the World Trade Center attacks.
As Oskar tries to make sense of his father's death, he invents contraptions that would protect people from harm, pain and death. Sept. 11 becomes both the before and after for Oskar; "before the worst day..." and "after the worst day..." is the division of his life.
"Many things are silent and far away," Safran-Foer said in a recent interview released by his publisher, Houghton-Mifflin.
"There are mute characters, and characters who can't hear. Characters who travel halfway around the world to be distant from those they love and characters who endlessly wander the city in an attempt to get home. ... And then there are the things like Oskar's relationship with his father that are simultaneously loud and silent, and close and far away," Safran-Foer said.
Parallel to Oskar's journey unfolds the heartbreaking story of his grandfather, who survived the Allied bombings of Dresden, Germany, during the second World War, while his first love does not. He comes to America sad and disheartened, marries his first love's sister and vows to be silent. He communicates by writing in a notebook, and by the word "Yes" tattooed on his right palm and the word "No" inked on his left. He longs to own all the blank pages in the world so he can communicate forever, and struggles with his inability to love his wife the way he loved her sister.
His eventual challenge is to explain to Oskar why he is more than the mysteriously silent stranger who rents a room in his grandmother's apartment. The reader, too, will struggle to understand the regret and silence that haunts Oskar's grandparents' relationship. Safran-Foer writes a painfully realistic story of lost love, regret and heartbreak that, like so much in life, does not have a happy ending.
Though Safran-Foer's novel centers on the tragedy of Sept. 11, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" also goes back in history, confronting the destruction of Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. Safran-Foer calls his novel a work of balances: "Humor and tragedy, destruction and invention, something and nothing, life and death," he said.
Safran-Foer stands out as one of the most original and imaginative writers of this generation. His creativity is illuminated by his ideas and style, as seen in letters to his hero, Stephen Hawking; the book's remarkable photographs of keyholes; and colorful words Oskar finds written on a notepad in an art store while searching to see if his father had been there. The book is also lit up by the way he intertwines the past and future to convey the humorous and often painful realities of life.
Reading Safran-Foer's novel is a truly visual experience. Perhaps the most compelling images are the last 15 pages of the novel, a series of photographs of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center. For Oskar, who mentally captures his thoughts and parts of his journey in pictures, the man is floating up to the sky, back through the building and eventually back home, where a young boy waits for his father to come home.
Safran-Foer will be at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue on April 11 at 7 p.m.
