Extremely Odd and Incredibly Good

Last week the Neland Women's Book Club gathered together to discuss Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I've waited until now to report on it because I wanted to finish it first.

In Foer's novel, young Oskar is mourning the loss of his father, who died in the September 11 attack in New York. He has found a key in his father's closet, and he sets off, searching New York, to find the lock that it opens. The novel incorporates several narratives, as well as unusual design elements such as pages with only a few words, and photos of Stephen Hawking, fingerprints, gemstones and other images that give insight into the main characters more than they illustrate the story.

The overall response to the novel was positive, though there was a feeling of disappointment from some regarding the way the quest ends.

Karen, our enthusiastic leader, started us off with some biographical information about the author. Then she opened the discussion by asking "What do you think this novel is about?" The fact that this question got a few different answers is indicative of the odd nature of the story. Don't read it if you like a story that moves from point A to B to C all the way to Z. This one starts at point A (sort of) then has more of a G, F, B, J, D style.

And so, what did we think the book was about? Here's what we came up with: It was about a boy working out his grief, Aspergers syndrome or autism, post traumatic stress syndrome, and missed communication. And of course, 9/11.

Now that I've finished the book, I can tell you that I absolutely loved it. I love the way the weird characters and strange narrative weave together to give you a picture of love and sadness and loss. This sad little boy is brilliant, funny, awkward and utterly honest. It's surreal--you have to be willing to suspend disbelief on several occasions--but if you can do it, you'll be rewarded.

The broken, hurting people in the book love each other fiercely, even against their wills sometimes. But none of them tell each other how they really feel. They keep secrets, and they keep quiet. At one point, the grandfather is going through customs with a pile of suitcases, and he tells the customs officer that he has nothing to declare. "'That's a lot of suitcases for someone with nothing to declare,' he said, I nodded, knowing that people with nothing to declare carry the most..." This line is only a small portion of the sentence, which should also show you that Foer plays fast and loose with the commas.

In spite of the comma issues, Foer is a gifted writer who brings the reader into the emotions and experiences of the characters. He gives several images of people who have put away emotions with physical items. Oskar hides a phone with messages from his father recorded on it from the day of his death. He wraps it up in a scarf, puts that inside a grocery bag, inside a box, inside another box and under a pile in his closet. Another boy ends a long relationship with his female best friend next door when she says "I love you" into the can on her side of the string between their houses. The boy breaks the string, puts a cover on the can and "put her love for him on a shelf in his closet."

There are so many lovely, odd, heartbreaking moments. The grandparents, who lost everything in the allied bombings on Dresden, found each other in America but could never share their grief. They lived in self-imposed silences--he refusing to speak, she refusing to see--unable to visit the reality of the past and therefore turning the present into a fiction. Oskar's mother tries to protect her son from her grief, and Oskar, in turn, tries to protect his mother from his own sadness. Oskar's elderly neighbor has cut himself off from the world by refusing to hear.

In spite of the sadness, there is also hope. In one remembered section, Oskar's father is telling his son a story. Oskar is questioning the factuality of the story. Oskar's father asks him if he's an optimist or a pessimist, and Oskar responds that he's an optimist. His father says "Well, that's good, because there's no irrefutable evidence. There's nothing that could convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to."

Real life, we women of Neland concluded, is "extremely loud and incredibly close." Sometimes that's too much for us, whether we are fragile, or grieving, or somewhere on the autistic scale. In good times, we take too much for granted, and we live with the guilt of that when disaster strikes. Karen did her best to bring us to tears by reading from the letter from the grandmother, who lost her sister Anna, along with the rest of her family, in the Dresden bombings.

"I said, I want to tell you something.
She said, You can tell me tomorrow.
I had never told her how much I loved her.
She was my sister.
We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always unnecessary...
I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.
Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.
It's always necessary.
I love you,
Grandma"