Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Thoughts on Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel

Jonathan Safran Foer, after living through the September 11th attacks, did what any young American novelist would do--he used the tragedy to create what is essentially a magic-realist novel about a nine year old boy. There are no terrorrists in his novel. There are no stock brokers. There are no firemen, no flags, no President Bush proclaiming solidarity from sea to shining sea. There is just Oskar, his family, his neighbor, and the myriad of colorful New Yprk residents who happen to share the name Black. There are, of course, other characters here and there that make the plot the not-so-linear narrative that it is. But the point is, Foer wrote a novel about the World Trade Center attacks--the viciously political attacks, the attacks that led (however injustifiably so) ot two wars, and the attacks that glaringly exposed the polarized political climate of this country--that was almost totally devoid of politics.
Most of the reviews I read take this for granted and focus on Foer's delightful yet unnerving sense of humor. Because his style is so flippant, so effortlessly funny, and so painstakingly artful, many think that JSF is doing a disservice to the gravity of the attacks. One reviewer concluded that JSF comes very close to capturing an emotional moment but that "too many times he's undone by his cleverness." Another decides that his style is so distracting with all the pictures and colors, an linguistically is so "Extremely Loud" that it prevents the reader from getting "Incredibly Close." These positions seem to imply (am I wrong here?) that aesthetic complexity and recreational tempo-changes within the novel diminish the possibility for effective, sincere, "realistic" narration. Nevermind that what people are invriably hoping for here is some kind of authentic through fictional portrait of grief. They seem to agree that JSF overdoes it, that the form obscures the content, and that te content is particularly important in a case such as this.
A less skeptical take on JSF's form is Michael Faber's, who in The Guardian, relates how the Hiroshima bombing is "used to audacciously comic effect, highlighting the was historical enormities always end up jostling for space with mundane concerns. Thus a painfully serious topic is given a whimsical spin in order to make a painfully serious point: Foer's enterprise in a nutshell." Yes, Michael Faber, that's nearly it: our minds have trouble accomodating enormities and are constantly bombarded by other things, like a ubiquitous media and a post-modern variety of experience. Yet the reason that enormities fight for space in our consciousness is not so much that they are cometing for space with the mundane but that they are fighting to exist there at all. That is, the human mind is so incapable of grasping and containing any enormity that our minds replace its failed attempts to do so with the only other material it can contain--the mundane, the quotidian, and above all, the personal.

All this being said, I have to wonder when we are going to realize, or better yet, accept, that Foer's style, in all its glory, its silliness, and its cryptic hyperbolies, is exactlythe way our / his generation experiences grief, and more and more, the only way we can. If we grant, as I do, that we are incapable of experiencing the actual grief of another, let alone any collective grief, and that therefore our only access to grief is through our own experience, then his apolitical novel can be read as extraordinarily apt. He uses a nine year old boy as a protagonist to drive the point home, that politics is secondary to personal loss, but it would be no less the case for any self-conscious middle aged intellectual. Does that make sense? His is a novel about loss, and more specifically a loss without faith. And, in using what is arguably the biggest political event of our time (us post-slavery, post-holocaust folk that is) as a backdrop, a foil even, Foer highlights, besides the by-now-cliche point that the personal is always political, that all we have is the personal, and that only from the personal do we imagine the political. This is not to diminish the political, only to emphasize that the political emanates from the personal and thus owes its entire existence to it. therefore, Foer's novel captures a singular reality of the attacks, the only reality which is the reality of one / each person's loss, which we know becomes the basis for collective action.

Ultimately, ours is a generation that defines itself, more than any other, in terms of imagined histories, ones that we had no part in because we have so few to call our own. We understand our world through movies and are comfortable with constant over stimulation. We may be in the middle of a serious talk and a call phone rings an Outkast song, and we are comfortable continually shifting between the serious and the ridiculous. Perhaps this is because we realize that everything, underneath it all, is ridiculous as the constructed subjects that we are. But my point here is that this doesn't make us feel any less accutely, or make us any less sincere. It may be a new way of accomodating grief, but it is still grief. And just because we can be interrupted doesn't kmean we weren't on task. Being jaded by history and continual overexposure does not prevent the possibility of quthentic modes of being and feeling. In fact, I would argue that the increasingly complictated forms of expression lend themselves to increasingly complicated states of awareness, and that, after everything, we are better off. And this is the succes of Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel--in showing his generation that the possibilities for experiencing grief can be silly without demeaning, can be a conglomeration without being distracting, and most importantly, can be personal without being selfish.