in defense of jonathan safran foer

I recently finished Jonathan Safran Foer's latest, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a novel that sat on my shelf for quite some time because the negative backlash had infiltrated the title selection part of my brain. What I had forgotten was the rich tapestry Foer weaves that stole my heart when I read Everything Is Illuminated. I've often told people that Foer's first novel is the only book I've ever read where I found myself unable to stop crying and unable to stop reading.

I can see why critics like Steve Almond thought Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was "desperate for attention," but I can't agree with Michel Faber (whose The Crimson Petal and The White was spectacular) that "there is much to admire, but little to love." Yes, it's true that Foer finds a gimmick and works it too hard. The novel tells the story of Oskar Schell, a precocious boy who is dealing with his father's death on 9/11. He struggles with "heavy boots," a euphemism for the weak hold he has on sanity and his debilitating depression. I loved the idea of "heavy boots," but it recurs with a relentless frequency. I was terribly moved by the idea of another character's heart broken into more pieces than it was made of:

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of the day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world...it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go...it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

Unfortunately, it was not as touching the next time it was described the same way. In the big picture, though, it doesn't matter. Foer's novels make me feel. It becomes an act beyond reading. It's being put in touch with so much pain, joy, truth, beauty, death, love, hate, fear, and life that I have to stop at the end of each chapter and regroup. Before I finally picked up this novel, I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and I waited to feel something, anything, but it was just a story. (I was relieved to see Old Hag felt the same way.) I may be confessing a bent toward sentimentality here, but it's so rare that reading transcends language for me, that I cherish it. As far as the much maligned gimmicks associated with Foer's second novel go, if you buy into them, they'll break your heart.
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