Upon its release, Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel, Everything is Illuminated, received the kind of stratospheric acclaim usually reserved for things like the vaccine for polio. That it was mostly accurate is almost as remarkable as the fact that his second book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, newly released in paperback, is not only a better book, but more importantly, a braver one.
“For whatever reason, people are most sensitive about art,” Foer says, regarding some of the negative reaction to the novel, which is the first by a major American writer to grapple with the events of September 11, 2001. “There’s a different relationship that the culture has with artists.”
In Foer’s book, we see the tragedy through the eyes of Oskar Schell, a precocious nine-year-old who writes letters to Stephen Hawking, speaks French, as well as that occasional pseudo-profane slang only nine-year-olds traffic in (“fudging crevasse-hole” and so forth), and becomes emotionally unglued after the death of his father in the fall of one of the World Trade Center towers. After finding a key in his father’s belongings, Oskar sets upon a quest across New York City to discover what it unlocks.
Hilarious and heartbreaking in his thoughts, Foer’s Oskar is eccentric enough to seem completely believable without being precisely realistic. “Novels are concerned with a different kind of reality,” Foer says. “I think there are things that novels can do that [nonfiction] just can’t do. Ways of creating empathy, ways of making people care … My goal was to create a character who evokes a set of real feelings.”
Foer says he goes to books “for something experiential,” and, with its moving story and a handful of pages that contain shrinking font sizes, doodling and assorted photographs, including a series of a body falling from the towers, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an unforgettable and moving experience.
With his current book tour, Foer is hoping to bring that experience to even more readers. Fans of challenging, funny, powerful work should take up the chance to see him.
The author of now two New York Times bestsellers, Foer himself is proud of the book while being surprisingly modest about its creator. “Good books are so much better than the people that write them,” he says, displaying an inspiring streak of literary populism. “The more people that read a book, the more content it has. In fact, the better the book gets — it gets smarter, it gets wiser, it gets funnier.”
Jonathan Safran Foer will be reading from and signing copies of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on April 20. Tickets are available for $2 from the Brookline Booksmith.
