Last week I was unable to write a blog post about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close because I honestly felt like all of the important things about it were talked about in class. Granted, there were things that I didn’t understand about the book, and questions that have gone unanswered, but I feel like this book is too untouchable to get any deeper meaning out of it. September 11th is something that still gets talked about and still causes extremely emotional reactions for some people. I feel like certain things in this book got ignored because of the emotional content that it contains and that frustrates me because I don’t think that Foer should be able to use those emotions as an excuse to leave things unresolved in his novel. What I mean is this: if he decided in 2005 that people were ready to read about September 11, 2001, he should have been ready to write about it. He should have taken his emotions and turned them into something great rather than something frustrating and uncomprehensible. If he wasn’t ready to do that then it was clearly too soon for him to tackle this project. I agree with what Rebecca said about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon. Foer does take the same approach, and as that book was still rather popular when Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close came out it’s likely he was trying to ride on its success. In trying to find more information to see if anyone else had thought of this I stumbled on this website:
http://www.literature-map.com/jonathan+safran+foer.html
The website puts the author you inquire about in the center of the screen and then moves other authors’ names closer to it or farther away depending on how likely it is that readers will like one if they like the other. So, when Foer’s name is in the center, Mark Haddon appears fairly close by, in my opinion close enough to denote the similarities in them but far enough apart to suggest that they are so similiar you might only be able to put up with one or the other. Interestingly enough, Cormac McCarthy shows up as one of the closest authors to Foer, however I really enjoy McCarthy’s work and struggled to find any kind of opinion at all on Foer’s work.