Writing in the Times recently, Dwight Garner described the novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer as “precious,” which it kind of is. But the book continues to resonate with me as a remembrance of 9/11.
The novel tells a story of Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old in New York City whose father died that day in the World Trade Center. After his father’s death, Oskar sets off on a journey through the city to find the lock that matches a key that belonged to his father. Early in the novel, Oskar remembers his father:
“Dad always used to tuck me in, and he’d tell the greatest stories, and we’d read the New York Times together, and sometimes he’d whistle ‘I am the Walrus,’ because that was his favorite song, even though he couldn’t explain what it meant, which frustrated me. One thing that was so great was how he could find a mistake in every single article we looked at. Sometimes they were grammar mistakes, sometimes they were mistakes with geography or facts, and sometimes the article just didn’t tell the whole story.
I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.”
The novel ends with a series of photographs of a man whose fall from the Twin Towers was captured by Richard Drew, a photojournalist on assignment with the Associated Press in an image that captures the horror of that day. Oskar reverses the series, flip-book style, so that the man appears to be falling upward. Oskar describes the effect:
“And if I’d had more pictures, he would have flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would have poured back into the hole that the plane was about to come out of. Dad would’ve left his messages backward, until the machine was empty, and the plane would’ve flown backward away from him, all the way to Boston.”
The chronology continues in reverse, with Oskar’s father walking backward to the subway and home, spitting coffee into his mug, unbrushing his teeth, and, the night before, telling Oskar a story, in reverse, from “I love you” to “Once upon a time…”