"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Jonathan Safran Foer

Oh dear Lord, this book pissed me off so much. Forgive me for going on at length, but sometimes it has to be done, for spiritual reasons, I suppose. Good for the soul!

I’ll start by pointing out one nice thing. One of the nice things about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that it has pictures, so there’s less of it to get through. However, the pictures themselves add nothing. Maybe it’s supposed to be “innovative,” but playing with text and pictures is nothing new – hell, Lawrence Sterne did it in Tristram Shandy and that was back when the printer was a man in a wig hunched over a wooden press. The thing is, Sterne was funny. 250 years later and we’ve regressed. Most of the photos are the equivalent of the clip art in a Powerpoint presentation - somebody doesn’t have enough to say about the future of, say, travel agencies, so they stick a cartoon of a smiling plane up on the slide. Safran Foer’s work is the same; the kid talks about a cat, there’s a photo of a cat. There’s a mention of the Staten Island ferry crash, so of course there’s a shot of a CNN report showing the busted-up ferry. And so on. Most of it’s dull, although I’m saving discussion of the money shot, so to say, for the end.

The text, what’s legible, isn’t that much better. Safran Foer can’t resist a “deep” moment, and it starts to become funny pretty quickly – who’s going to cry next, or come up with a cutesy Rube Goldberg contraption that reflects the Nature of Love, or throw out a trite reflection on Death, or write something, hence demonstrating within the text the limits of the writer’s form, or – well, it goes on. None of the characters are presented as anything other than appealing in a stock sort of way, despite the fact that they are all collections of tics and oddities. As an example, there’s a subplot that takes place in WWII Dresden, of all places, and the German family involved is sheltering a Jewish artist who makes pithy comments about the state of the world. Presumably if they hadn't been sheltering a Jew, or sheltered one of those pushy Jews instead, the reader would think that they were Bad Germans and deserved to have their lungs set aflame. No, I’m being going at this from the wrong direction – it’s much more likely that Safran Foer is constitutionally incapable of writing a character who doesn’t speak in the language of a Hallmark card. Some of the conceits would be cute or charming if they were spaced out into individual books, and I like a good love story, but thrown all together it’s like – to quote an Amazon reviewer with a better grasp of metaphor than Safran Foer – “reading a book in the middle of a swarm of bees.”

Back to the pictures: the book ends with a series of pictures of a man falling out of one of the WTC buildings. I know that this is the classic cry of the prude, but there’s really not much that will positively stop me from finishing a book. I may get bored, but content-wise I can deal with almost anything if it holds my interest. That said, I couldn’t get through the flipbook at the end. It was just too disgusting. I read the last page of text with my head turned to the left and then slammed the book shut because I knew what was coming. I mean, that’s a real person who died in a horrible way and here comes Jonathan Safran Foer to Marley and Me all over his splattered remains by putting him in a goddamn flipbook like something out of a Cracker Jack box. Perhaps I am a softheaded moralist, but I think rather that this reaction reflects some deep inner fear of mine, that one day I will die in a terrifying and humiliating way and then my remains will be immortalized in a mash-up of The Tin Drum and Love Actually.