Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Words are sometimes not enough to express the enormity of grief or make sense of tragedy, but authors try anyway. Jonathan Safran Foer's take on such a task is to interrupt the reader with typographic tricks and pictures.

Blank pages, single sentences to a page, squashed text, disjointed text, text encircled with red pen, photographs of doorknobs, keys, stars, apartment windows, the backs of heads, an elephant's eye, Stephen Hawking on a videocam and Sir Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet all play a part in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Not to mention the 15-page sequence of a blurred body falling from one of the World Trade Center towers — except that the flipbook runs in reverse so "it looked like the man was floating up through the sky."

At times Safran Foer's picto/typographic devices are arresting — like the text that gets ever more closely condensed until it becomes unreadable.

"There won't be enough pages in this book for me to tell you what I need to tell you, I could write smaller, I could slice the pages down their edges to make two pages, I could write over my own writing, but then what?"

Literally seeing what is said can be extremely annoying and incredibly irritating. Safran Foer is obviously making points about the difficulty of communication. One of his three narrators, Thomas Schell snr, cannot speak and so needs a variety of graphical techniques to make himself understood — once by means of a telephone keypad.

Safran Foer underlines this by giving us two and a half pages of numerals an ideal reader might wish to decipher, but which made me want to yell something unprintable extremely loudly and incredibly close to the author's face.

Close succeeds most in the central narrative of Oskar Schell, a precocious, compulsive tambourine-playing, white-clothes wearing, death-obsessed 9-year-old atheist living in post-9/11 Manhattan, and trying to deal with the tragedy of losing his father, Thomas, in the twin towers' collapse.

One year later, Oskar finds in his father's wardrobe a key in an envelope labelled "Black" and determines to visit the 216 Black households in New York to unlock the mystery.

It's a clumsy and improbable plot device — who would let a 9-year-old traipse alone around New York — but as a journey into grief to make sense of an insensible world, Oskar's odyssey is compelling.

Safran Foer lays tragedy on tragedy in the back story of Oskar's grandparents — survivors of the World War II fire-bombing of Dresden. Oskar's grandfather, who narrates either in outpourings of text without paragraphs or in single sentences to a page, remains tortured by the death of his first fiancee, Anna, and their unborn child, in the bombing.

Oskar's grandmother, Anna's younger sister, is similarly obsessed and narrates her feelings in short, flush-left paragraphs with extra spaces between sentences. On one occasion she writes without a ribbon on the typewriter — to which Safran Foer give us blank pages.

The grandparents' marriage of silence and strictly observed zones of "Nothing and Something" in their apartment is based on shared loss. Loss that compounds when the grandfather flees back to Dresden in 1963, before the birth of his son Thomas, and returns to New York following 9/11 "to mourn and try to live".

If Safran Foer's stunts are intended to disrupt reader expectations about conventions of writing, they succeed. But one can't help feeling this novel, without the antics and with little less artifice, might have delivered more.

Hamish Hamilton
$35