I’m not sure I understand how EL&IC works as a a whole. The various bits and pieces, such as the images scattered throughout and the pages of other people’s letters and notebooks, while referenced in the various bits of narrative, feel like puzzles to me. I constantly pore over the pictures, the red-circled edits, the one-liner pages, the letters written by various characters, and the pieces of the obstacle-course-treasure-hunt Oskar has embarked upon in search of his father, because I keep feeling like I’m missing something. I’ve been staring at these things for hours now and I still feel like I’m missing some big piece somewhere. The book leaves things just confused enough, just vague enough, and is just full enough of little puzzles that I can’t stop thinking there must be more meanings in these little bits—why else would they have been included?—and I also can’t stop mentally kicking myself for not being able to find anything vastly revelatory in them. What is the secret? The scraps of these things seem to be thrown into the novel so haphazardly; some are included soon after or before they are mentioned in the narrative, while others are thrown in at a completely different moment, to the point where I wonder if there is any real intention behind their arrangement. Why the pictures of so many doorknobs, for example? Ok, so his grandfather (I think? or whoever) took a bunch of pictures of doorknobs—so what? That fact seemed irrelevant enough, but then to have so many of (I assume) these pictures thrown in at apparently random intervals makes me wonder what Foer is attempting to signify. Is Oskar’s key meant to fit one of these photographed doorknobs eventually, or are they just completely superfluous? I think overall the inability to comment on EL&IC, for myself at least, is that I’m not even remotely sure what I make of it in the first place. It’s confusing in a way that is pretty atypical; it’s not entirely the confusion of a mystery (such as Oskar’s detective search for his father), or of complete mumbo-jumbo (the narratives are, while perhaps not entirely, largely coherent and cohesive), or of form (letters of various kinds, narrations from various people, blurred chronology, etc.), but rather the confusion of not understanding how all of these things come together to do work for the novel as a whole. I find it difficult to believe that the point of it all is just to be confusing (because that’s kind of lame), or even just an experiment with form, but having ruled that out I find it even more difficult to figure out what work it is accomplishing. Anything I have to think about EL&IC, at least up through now, effectively boils down to a big “I dunno.”
frustration
There’s been a lot of discussion about the novel as magical realism, psychological realism, and so on, but your post made me think of another way to consider the novel: as what has been called a “metaphysical detective” novel. Whereas traditional detective stories begin with a crime and end with a solution, the metaphysical detective story refuses simple answers, and the detective’s search for clues (in this case, both Oskar and us, the readers are detectives) is doomed to fail. The metaphysical detective novel thus becomes more of a philosophical quest.
In one of the most important articulations of the metaphysical detective story, Michael Holquist puts it quite nicely: “If, in the detective story, death must be solved, in the new metaphysical detective story it is life which must be solved.”
Do you think this idea might apply to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close?
With regards to the random pictures of doorknobs scattered around the novel… I think they were supposed to signify the human attempt to attain security through recording, i.e. the doorknobs, ostensibly photographed for insurance purposes, were in fact photographed to make something permanent which is, in fact, not permanent at all. The grandfather was trying to concretely obtain a sense of place by doing so, because he knows how utterly transient and destructible “home” really is. So the random reappearance of these doorknobs reinforces that idea of need while also highlighting how arbitrary the act is, if that makes sense.