Whimsy in the Face of Terror
BISSELL, TOM
Whimsy in the Face of Terror Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close By Jonathan Safran Foer Houghton Mifflin. 326 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Tom Bissell Author, "God Lives in St. Petersburg,'...
...Along the way we are treated to a menagerie of colorful characters—who often are as peculiar as Oskar—plus photos Foer has inserted into the text and many, many typographical escapades: pages whose words crowd together to make an angry black swarm, colored pages, pages with red circles, pages that contain only one sentence...
...the wake of charm he leaves in the minds of Foer's readers will vary...
...The 9/11 plotters were, among other things, sinisterly creative...
...Similarly, one brief scene that finds Oskar chatting with his therapist reminds us, with its careful, casual, yet still hardwon humor, of Foer's true strengths...
...When Oskar says, "Being with [my father] made my brain quiet," or describes "a lot of stuff that made me panicky, like suspension bridges, germs, airplanes, fireworks, Arab people on the subway (even though I'm not racist), Arab people in restaurants and coffee shops and other public places, scaffolding, sewers and subway grates, bags without owners, shoes, people with mustaches, smoke, knots, tall buildings, turbans," that little boy is as real as the children we all became at isolated moments in those first terrible days after the attacks...
...The growing revelation of what Oskar knows about his father's fate, and how he knows it, pounds away at the reader with a sick foreboding...
...His first novel, EverythingIs Illuminated (2002), is a hilarious and often touching work that manages to make even its own failings somehow endearing...
...Anderson's whimsy was less serious but more fun...
...Petersburg,' "Chasing the Sea" AT 28, Jonathan Safran Foer is the most commercially and critically successful fiction writer of his generation...
...Foer is at his best when he writes with the least whimsy and fewest conceits...
...One suspects that much of the outrage will not be that such an explicit 9/11 novel has been written but that it is Jonathan Safran Foer who has written it...
...Their A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and Rushmore (1998), respectively, are both genuine works of art...
...Much of Foer's artistic platform is founded on the idea that creativity is inherently valuable and should be promoted at all times...
...In the end, none surpass the effects of artful prose, as Foer seems to believe...
...This is, of course, a debatable notion...
...If one admires Foer's talent, this has been worrying, for it is hard to think of any writer for whom panoramic celebrity has not proved massively complicating...
...The novel itself turns out to be an endorsement of both views, for it is filled with moments of wrenching power and yet marred by a threadbare cleverness...
...Does Oskar, in his precocity and breadth of interests, remind us of anyone...
...But Foer has done it...
...Sui generis at first glance, still fairly appealing at second, somewhat irritating at third, the New Whimsy was cleaved in two by geopolitics...
...There are also the occasional wonders of Foer's language...
...The boy, the jacket copy tells us, "is an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist...
...Creativity is only as good as the skill, or the motive, powering it...
...This is empathetic writing of a high order, and it has nothing to do with Shakespeare or veganism, but rather with the hard work of diligently imagining one's way into another life...
...In the main, the New Whimsy takes "creativity" as its chief concern, favoring the garishly imaginative, subordinating the political and displaying fitful but knowing circumspection...
...Portions of it are concerned with the story of Oskar's grandparents, who before fleeing to New York survived the firebombing of Dresden—arguably an all too obvious parallel...
...Indeed, the extent to which he serves as a spiritual stand-in for Foer is left a queasily open matter...
...Hedging one's view of genius has since proved a pure New Whimsy move...
...It would be difficult to argue that this novel would suffer one bit without its extraliterary excursions...
...Why does this supposed little Beatlemaniac not know that "Something in the Way She Moves" is a James Taylor song while "Something" is a Beatles song...
...The book is simply great fun to read—though the judgment of the famously hostile critic Dale Peck, who proclaimed it one of "the best novels I've ever been fortunate enough to hold in my hands," was little short of preposterous...
...Foer is among the more cunning and talented of its post-9/11 practitioners, so his decision to write about the attacks seems inevitable...
...Eggers has abandoned the New Whimsy—his most recent work, the story collection How We Are Hungry (2003), does not much resemble Heartbreaking...
...Because Oskar finds the key in an envelope labeled "Black," he decides to hunt down all those named "Black" in New York City to leam which lock (he has calculated that the five boroughs are host to 162 million) the key opens...
...His fans will say, "As the leading literary voice of his generation, who better...
...It concerns a key that belonged to Oskar's father and becomes an obsession...
...The more time one spends with Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the more one is impressed by the sheer brio that went into its conception...
...In the novel's scattered allusions to the doomed Washington intern Chandra Levy, Foer exhibits a wonderfully light touch while reminding us how absurd many of our concerns were before (in Oskar's understated words) "the worst day...
...Can one treat an antidote with a snakebite...
...Foer will be attacked for this...
...Both feel, in some crucial sense, autopiloted, borrowed, false...
...The fantastically fictional yet nevertheless familiar Oskar—a character as instant as Ramen noodles—is a product of the New Whimsy, a mode fashionable among many young artists for the last decade...
...A movie version of Illuminated, with Elijah Wood—Frodo in the Lord of the Rings trilogy—playing the Foer character, is in the offing...
...It is not nearly good enough...
...But spending more time with Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close also increases an awareness of the places it does not go frequently enough and those in which it spends far too much time...
...When searching for subject matter, writers generally need more time than the culture (or their publisher) is willing to allow them...
...For this reader, the author's small stumbles do not help: Would a boy who reads A Brief History of Time forpleasure and has a cat named after Buckminster Fuller really not know who Winston Churchill is...
...He will be championed too...
...As for the book's main story, the September 11 attacks are, thankfully, merely the backdrop of a very Foerian conceit...
...Novelists who hit triple cherries on their first trip to the casino often respond with work that is rushed and diminished— a calculus of failure stretching from Norman Mailer to Jay Mclnerney to Zadie Smith...
...He found afresh charactertypein Rushmore's Max Fisher, from whom Oskar Schell plainly descends: the boy genius short on actual talent and overflowing with enchantingly misplaced ambition...
...He is less a prose writer than a line writer, but what lines he is capable of...
...This is a good novel...
...The majority of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is narrated by nine-year-old Oskar Schell, whose father, Thomas, was attending a meeting in the upper reaches of one of the World Trade Center towers the morning of the attack...
...From the latest efforts of Anderson and the rest who have kept at the New Whimsy, it is becoming clear that the fashion had a definite expiration date...
...Yet it has stuck around and remained at least commercially strong...
...And is a tsunami novel next...
...He has written a novel addressing the one public tragedy everyone in the United States over the age of five experienced at varying degrees of remove but, all the same, experienced vividly and horribly...
...Two of the style's earliest and most brilliant practitioners are Dave Eggers and the filmmaker Wes Anderson...
...Some will be bothered by these flourishes, others will relish them...
...The conversation between Oskar and his mother, who has a new boyfriend, about the child's resentment—with the unforgettable crescendo it reaches in his announcement that he wishes she had died instead of his father—is brilliantly executed and as painful as an exposed nerve...
...His foes will argue, "The main problem with fame is that it is attracted only to fame, and perhaps America's leading young writer should pick his subject matter with more evident humility...
...If anything, they leave an unappealing impression—that of an author who has been fatally overindulged...
...Foer renders the burning Dresden scene terrifyingly well, but the remainder of the grandparental story does not always seem vital, and in this it resembles the derivatively "magical" aspects of Illuminated's similar backstory...
...In the most reductive sense, Foer's first novel was about the Holocaust, and it would be hard to come up with second-novel material as daunting...
...His departure is not surprising, for his whimsy always contained thorns of immense personal loss...
...In other words, the klieg lights are not yet warm...
...By any measure, Oskar is a ludicrous creation...
...Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is much less explicit about 9/11 than its naysayers will accuse it ofbeing...
...He has written a 9/11 novel...
...Peck's reliable addiction to hyperbole aside, it is among the most mature and fully realized books ever produced by someone comparably young, placing Foer among the ranks of Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Martin Amis, and John Updike...
...Foer connects Dresden to muteness, to 9/11, to the souls of several wounded New Yorkers, and does so with considerable adroitness...
...He is also a Beatles fanatic, a former atheist, a vegan, and a pesterer of celebrities...
Vol. 88 • March 2005 • No. 2
