Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

For the film adaptation, see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (film).

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Author(s)	Jonathan Safran Foer
Cover artist	Jon Gray
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin
Publication date	1 April 2005 (1st edition)
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	368 pp (hardback & paperback editions)
ISBN	ISBN 0-618-32970-6 (hardback edition) ISBN 0-618-71165-1 (paperback edition)
OCLC Number	57319795
Dewey Decimal	813/.6 22
LC Classification	PS3606.O38 E97 2005

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. The book's narrator is a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. In the story, Oskar discovers a key in a vase that belonged to his father that inspires him to search all around New York for information about the key.

Synopsis

The main narrator of the story is a nine-year-old child, Oskar Schell, an intellectually curious and sensitive child, with an active, and sometimes crippling, imagination. His father had died two years earlier on 9/11. He is a pacifist, a vegan, musician (he plays the tambourine), academically-inclined, and above all, earnest. Oskar wanders New York, searching for the meaning of a strange key he finds inside a blue vase in his father's closet. Two additional narrators, Oskar's paternal grandparents, tell the story of their childhood, courtship, marriage, and separation before the birth of Oskar's father; much of their story is presented as a series of letters addressed to Oskar or his father.

Critical response

Critical response towards Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has been generally less positive than for Foer's first novel, Everything Is Illuminated; John Updike, writing for The New Yorker, found the second novel to be "thinner, overextended, and sentimentally watery", stating that "the book's hyperactive visual surface covers up a certain hollow monotony in its verbal drama". In a New York Times review Michiko Kakutani said, "While it contains moments of shattering emotion and stunning virtuosity that attest to Mr. Foer's myriad gifts as a writer, the novel as a whole feels simultaneously contrived and improvisatory, schematic and haphazard." Kakutani also stated the book was "cloying" and identified the unsympathetic main character as a major issue. Harry Siegel, writing in New York Press, bluntly titled his review of the book "Extremely Cloying & Incredibly False: Why the author of Everything Is Illuminated is a fraud and a hack", seeing Foer as an opportunist taking advantage of 9/11 "to make things important, to get paid" while also adding "The writers who make it get treated as symbols. Whitehead gets compared to Ellison, because they're both black; Lethem writes a book about race invisibility, but since he's a white boy, no one thinks to mention Ellison. In the same vein, Foer is supposed to be our new Philip Roth, though his fortune-cookie syllogisms and pointless illustrations and typographical tricks don't at all match up to or much resemble Roth even at his most inane. But Jews will be Jews, apparently." Anis Shivani said similarly in a Huffington Post article entitled "The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers", claiming Foer "Rode the 9/11-novel gravy train with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, giving us a nine-year-old with the brain of a twenty-eight-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer".

Despite several mediocre reviews, the novel was viewed positively in the eyes of several critics. The Herald said that it was a "wonderful" book and is filled with "creative and quirky thoughts".^{[citation needed]} The Spectator said that "Safran Foer is describing a suffering that spreads across continents and generations" and that the "book is a heartbreaker: tragic, funny, intensely moving".^{[citation needed]} The Financial Times thought the novel was "wise, funny and incredibly sad."^{[citation needed]}

Awards and honors

• New York Public Library's "Books to Remember" list
• International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Shortlist (2007)
• The Morning News Tournament of Books (Quarterfinalist, 2006)
• New York Times Bestseller (Fiction, 2005)
• Libraires du Québec (Lauréat Roman hors Québéc, 2007)
• ALA Outstanding Books for the College Bound (Literature & Language Arts, 2009)
• ALA Notable Books for Adults (2006)
• Village Voice 25 Favorite Books (2005)
• V&A Illustration Award (2005)

Film adaptation

Main article: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (film)

A film adaptation of the novel was released on January 20, 2012. The script was written by Eric Roth, and Stephen Daldry directed. Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, John Goodman, Viola Davis, and Jeffrey Wright starred, alongside 2010 Jeopardy! Kids Week winner Thomas Horn, 12, as Oskar Schell. The film was produced by Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros.

Comparisons to The History of Love

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published in early 2005 as was The History of Love, written by Nicole Krauss who had just married Foer. Both books feature a precocious youth who set out in New York City on a quest. Both protagonists encounter old men with memories of World War II (a Holocaust survivor in Krauss and a survivor of the Dresden firebombing in Foer). Both old men recently suffered the death of long-lost sons. The stories also use some similar and uncommon literary techniques, such as unconventional typography.

See also

• September 11, 2001 attacks in popular culture

External links

• Interview of Foer following release of novel, Mother Jones Magazine, May/June 2005.