Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

The first book of the year for me, hopefully a not-at-all tone-setting choice, was this fairly well-known offering from that brief but essential "New York after 9/11" subgenre of fiction. It's about a boy whose father died on 9/11. A year after his death the boy finds a strange key among his father's belongings, and so he sets out all across New York City looking to find someone who might know more about his father or the key he left behind - in the process, wouldn't you know it, discovering the vibrant and varied people all over the city, each harboring their own lives and regrets and sorrows.

It's a good book. Not great, as it's a little "Oprah's Book Club"-y, but it's already twelve years old (wow!) and we can probably forgive it for taking on a slightly cheesier tone than a lot of contemporary prestige fiction. I have two main thoughts about this one.

One is "sentimentalism." The book is full of sadness and tears and private tragedies and exploring in general the open wound that New York was in the aftermath of the attacks, and none of that is inherently a bad thing. There's a big old healing process that needed to occur, and in some ways still does, and never fully will for people of a certain age, and it's perfectly fine for a New Yorker like Jonathan Safran Foer to explore that grieving process by writing a story about it. But where things got a little too Mitch Albom for my liking was in a separate, parallel story about the boy's grandparents and their weird and estranged relationship. They're both survivors of the firebombing of Dresden, and I mean, that's fine and all, and I get the parallels between Dresden and September 11th, but I'm not sure how well their story ever really fit into the boy's journeys through New York to learn about his father. And even on the boy's journeys. he meets all kinds of classically sad people, from a woman going through a divorce to an old man who hasn't left his apartment in 24 years. And I'm not clear what Foer's trying to do with all these characters and their various sadnesses, other than to say, "look at how sad these people are, and imagine if we could all just be open and honest with each other and ourselves about our pain, and isn't this wonderful?" I get that not everything needs to be dark and depressing and cynical, but there's also a way to explore sadness through optimism and humor - this is what Vonnegut did so well, for instance, speaking of the firebombing of Dresden - or through immense "this will never be okay" sorrow and grieving (Manchester by the Sea, for instance). But Foer never really seems to take it past "so much sadness, and isn't it kind of beautiful?" And again, maybe that's fine. Maybe a bestseller is allowed to be a little sentimental and cheesy, especially one about a boy who lost his dad on 9/11, especially for a nation (and a city) still healing. I'm just saying it stuck out, often to the book's detriment, all of that shallow "smiling through tears" sentiment.

The other major takeaway, and one I'm still wrapping my head around, is a little more disconcerting. So, the book begins, and the majority of it is told form the point of view of this nine-year-old boy, in the first person, and within about two paragraphs it's clear to me that the kid is mildly autistic, or at least that he has Aspergers. He counts stairs, he counts minutes, he has very specific phobias and superstitions and routines, he's inquisitive as hell and a little socially awkward - it's just all of these classic symptoms, right off the bat. And for the rest of the book, in my mind, the kid was somewhere on the spectrum, and that added a little subtext to his relationship with his mother, his grieving process, the alienation he felt at school - on multiple instances, another kid calls him a "retard," and he responds matter-of-factually with "I'm not mentally retarded." Like, the way he opened up to total strangers during his quest for information was, in my mind, an added triumph. And Foer never had his other characters bring up, even implicitly, that the kid was autistic at all, which made the whole thing a stronger fictionalized account of an autism disorder than, say, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the night-Time, where the entire purpose of the story seemed to be, "hey, this kid has autism, look at how every day life is a novel adventure for him because of how his mind works." Rather, here in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the purpose of the story was very much "here's New York after 9/11, look at how wounded everyone is," and as an added quirk the main character happens to be mildly autistic, which adds flavor to his story without taking it over. Not so fast! After finishing the book I started to read a little bit about it, and the reaction to it - as one does - and was astonished to find that whether or not the boy was on the spectrum was up for debate. Wait, what? Apparently in the film adaptation, it's explicitly stated that the boy has Aspergers. But Foer himself, when asked, said that he never thought of the boy as having any sort of autism. Now, granted, creators often play coy when discussing their intentions - what better way to prevent people from talking about your stories than to explain them? - but if we can take Foer at face value, I just think that's astonishing. Like, hey man, you were a young boy once, and it doesn't seem like you have Aspergers. Is this really how you remember thinking and acting and behaving? And look, whether or not the kid has Aspergers shouldn't be a big deal - hell, I appreciated how subtle it was throughout the book, so it's a little hypocritcal for me to make it into a huge deal after the fact - but Foer's denial or ambivalence regarding the issue just adds fuel to the "eye-rolling sentimentalism" fire. Because if the kid doesn't have Aspergers or autism, then he's just... precocious. Which, hey, is fine. And doesn't really change the story or anything. (But like, come on - of course he's got Aspergers!)

All in all, a decent read. There's just enough depth to the sadness for this one to resonate more than tear-jerking schlock, and the kid's particular mindset and point of view make things, intentionally or otherwise, interesting.