Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close & Frequently Read
Based on previous posts and on my own ambition to be as well-read as the next guy, I just read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer.
The basis for the story here is a difficult one — a boy who lost his father in 9/11. I think that’s part of what makes the story so moving — that it resonates with anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave since September 10, 2001 (and doesn’t know what happened the next day), or with anyone who’s ever lost a parent, or with anyone who’s ever had a child.
I haven’t read Foer’s first book, Everything is Illuminated, and so I’m not prepared to comment on his writing style in general, but in this book, he pretty much writes like a nine year-old boy would talk. A borderline unbelievably-smart nine year-old boy, but a precocious, imaginative nine year-old boy nonetheless. The story and the writing don’t get bogged down in metaphor or overly-challenging verbosity (speaking of which, is verbosity a word?). And with this simple style, he still manages to make some pretty amazing statements, both philosophical (”[s]he wants to know if I love her, that’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet”) and even metaphorical (”[i]t broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of”). There are a few challenging aspects to his writing style in this book — e.g., conversations aren’t broken down into new paragraphs every time the speaker changes; they are written as a series of quotes in the same paragraph, requiring you to “keep score” in your head as you’re reading the paragraph to remember who’s talking at any given point. And there are some quirky elements added in for good measure — pages with just a couple words on them, pages where the text scrunches into itself, the flipbook movie at the end — but they didn’t annoy me.
All in all, a fine book. Not exactly happy reading, but somehow not really a tragedy, either. And I must say that what Foer does in the last two pages (before the flipbook movie), seems so simple, but as you read it, you can’t help but realize that it represents absolute genius in both thinking and writing.
July 2, 2005 9:30 am 
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By DJ Cayenne, July 5, 2005 @ 9:37 am
Glad that you liked it. I hate it when you really enjoy a book and then it gets panned by the rest of the posse (see Fortress of Solitude). Now give me my book back.
By Shaft, July 5, 2005 @ 2:32 pm
You can have your book back as soon as you set up the cocktail party with Foer and his wife (assuming you invite me). As for getting a book panned, take a look at what Swizzle did to Max Tivoli. Sheesh.
By swizzle d, July 6, 2005 @ 11:02 am
Shaft, you are just much more sentimental than me ( extrapolating the “love” quotes again…just like in Tivoli )…read something a little more controversial than some dude’s metaphor like “my love is like a cherry that had no stone”…now this is thought provoking…take that Bono and all you other booty shaking Live 8 self promoting, over rated, non productive “artists”…..http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,archiv,00.html