Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer

This is not a perfect book but Oskar, the nine-year-old narrator, is so awkwardly appealing and his efforts to investigate the family’s tragedy so heart-rending that I happily forgive it its faults. Oskar is bullied at school. He performs experiments in his laboratory and is continually ‘inventing’. Sometimes his inventions are bizarre imaginary apparatuses, sometimes they are the worst things that might happen. He writes offering his services to both Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall. When school is dismissed early on September the 11th Oskar comes home to an empty flat. Before his mother can reach him, he has listened to a series of telephone messages from his father, the last he will ever hear.

He discovers a key left by his father with only the cryptic note ‘Black’ and sets out on a quest to find every resident of New York by that name.

Wound in to this story is that of his mother, her sister and her parents, narrated by the characters themselves in intervening chapters. This is where Foer’s story telling breaks down. Oskar’s chapters, while idiosyncratic and strange, are easy to follow. The grandparents’ employ equally unusual language but this time to the confusion of the reader. A chapter can run for paragraphs before the identity of the narrator is disclosed. There are disorienting skips in time back and forward to the second world war in Dresden. The other aspect I could have done without is the pictures. They are occasional but reiterate story points and are unneeded. There is also tricky typography, at one point becoming deliberately overlaid into a dense, black unreadable mass.

These quibbles aside I have no hesitation in recommending this. If it doesn’t make you cry, you need your tear ducts replaced.