Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

What's inside (8 sections)

1. A boy who invents and a dad who sent him searching
2. The blue vase and the envelope that says Black
3. Knocking on every door with the same last name
4. The renter upstairs who decides to come along
5. Grandma across the street and grandpa who stopped talking
6. What the key fit and what Oskar did after
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

A friend pressed this book on me after I said I could not read another 9/11 novel. She said this one was different because it is told by a kid who talks too much and invents things. I went in expecting something heavy. What I got was louder and stranger than I expected.

First published in 2005 by Houghton Mifflin in a 368 page edition, ISBN 9780618329700, the novel is set in New York in 2002 and 2003, a year or two after the towers fell. It has three voices that alternate. Most of it is Oskar Schell, nine years old, talking fast in present tense. The other parts are letters from his grandmother to Oskar, and letters from his grandfather to Oskar father, written over decades but read late in the book. The chapters jump in time. Dresden in 1945 sits next to the Upper West Side in 2003 without much warning.

Oskar lives with his mom across the street from his grandma. His dad is gone. That absence shapes every page.

A boy who invents and a dad who sent him searching

Oskar Schell is nine at the start and turns ten during the story. He calls himself an inventor and a pacifist and a bunch of other titles that change by the week. He carries a tambourine he shakes when he gets nervous. He has a camera and a list of fears that keeps growing. Bridges and subways and tall buildings and airplanes. After what happened to his dad, the list gets longer.

His dad, Thomas Schell, ran a jewelry business and played elaborate games with Oskar. He called them reconnaissance expeditions. He would give Oskar a clue or a strange instruction and send him out into the city to look closely at things. Find a lock with no key. Talk to someone in a shop you have never entered. Map Central Park from memory. The point was to pay attention and to not be afraid to ask people questions. Oskar loved those days because his dad treated him like a colleague rather than a child.

His mom, Linda Schell, works through her own grief in a quieter way. She listens to self help tapes, tries to keep routines, starts spending time with a man named Ron who Oskar immediately dislikes. Oskar adores his dad and feels distant from his mom for a lot of the book. He thinks she does not understand him. He thinks she has moved on too fast. A lot of that changes by the end, but for the first half he keeps her at arm length.

On September 11, 2001, Thomas was in a meeting in the World Trade Center. He called home five times while Oskar was at school and left messages on the answering machine. Oskar got home before his mom and heard them. The last calls get shorter and more frightened. In the final one you can hear other voices in the background. Oskar kept the existence of those messages to himself. He replaced the answering machine with a new one so his mom would never know he had listened, and he hid the old phone in a secret compartment. He also kept reliving what he should have done that morning. Said goodbye differently. Picked up the phone if he had been home.

That guilt sits under everything. I thought Foer handled those phone messages better than I feared. He does not print them as a big dramatic transcript. He lets Oskar circle around them, mention one detail, then back away.

The blue vase and the envelope that says Black

About a year and a half later, Oskar goes into his dad closet when his mom is out. He says he goes in there to be close to his dad clothes and shoes. While reaching up high he knocks down a blue vase and it shatters. Inside the broken pieces is a small envelope. In it is a key. The envelope has one handwritten word on it. Black.

Oskar becomes convinced the key was left for him. Like another reconnaissance expedition from his dad, even though his dad never mentioned it. He imagines a lock somewhere in the city that will explain something or lead to something his dad wanted him to find. He turns the key over for days. It does not look like a house key or a bike lock key. It looks like it might open a safe deposit box or a filing cabinet or a strange old trunk.

He also finds a business card or a note tucked with it, I remember it pointing vaguely toward a connection to a man named Black, but nothing clear. Oskar does what Oskar does. He makes a plan. He looks up every person named Black in the New York City phone books. Five boroughs. He counts 472 names, or something close to that number. If I have the exact total wrong by a few, the point stands. It is a huge list.

He decides to visit every Black, in alphabetical order, and ask if they knew his father. He buys a map and marks them off. He brings his notebook and his camera for visual aids. He packs his tambourine and supplies. He tells his grandma but asks her not to tell his mom. That decision matters later.

This is where the book shifts from grief story to quest story. Some readers will buy it right away. Others will think no nine year old would be allowed to roam Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island alone knocking on strangers doors. I had that thought too. I had to set it aside to keep going, and mostly I could, because Oskar way of talking carries you forward.

Knocking on every door with the same last name

The middle of the book is Oskar working through the Blacks. Abby Black. Ada Black. Agnes and Allen and Arnold. Some meetings last two pages. Some last twenty.

One woman is getting divorced and cries while Oskar sits awkwardly on her couch. One couple argues about whether to let him in. One man thinks Oskar is selling something. An artist shows him her work. A nurse offers him cookies. A father and son barely speak to each other and Oskar notices. He asks each one the same basic questions. Did you know Thomas Schell. Do you recognize this key. Do you know what it opens.

He takes pictures. He writes down odd details. The shape of a living room. A parrot that repeats a phrase. A sign on a fridge. He is polite in a rehearsed way and then blurts out something raw about his dad dying. People respond to that honesty. Most invite him in even when they are busy.

These chapters can feel repetitive if you read them fast. That is partly the point, I think. Grief makes you repeat yourself. Searching makes you repeat yourself. But I will admit I skimmed a couple of the shorter Black visits on first read. On second read I slowed down and liked how different each household felt. Foer uses them to show the city as crowded and lonely at once. Everyone has a closed door. Most will open it a crack if a kid asks a direct question.

Oskar travels by subway and bus even though he is terrified of public transport. He gets blisters. He keeps a scrapbook of the search. His school life fades to the background. He writes letters to Stephen Hawking and other famous people asking about inventions and loss. Those letters are sweet because he never gets the answer he wants.

What kept me reading was not the mystery of the key. It was Oskar voice. He puns and invents. He wants to build a skyscraper that will not fall and a suit to protect pigeons. He mixes facts he read in a science book with complete misunderstandings. He sounds forty in one sentence and completely nine in the next. That unevenness annoyed some critics. It charmed me more often than it annoyed me, though there were moments where I thought no kid talks like this.

The renter upstairs who decides to come along

Early in the list Oskar meets an old man who lives in his own building. Mr. Black, or rather the elder Mr. Black. He is 103 years old, or close to it. He lives upstairs and rarely leaves. He turns his hearing aid off when he wants quiet. He has lived through a lot and keeps index cards with words for days when speaking feels hard. He has a life organized around routines and small tasks.

At first Oskar just interviews him like the others. Then something shifts. The old man offers to come with him on the rest of the search. Oskar says yes, partly because he is tired of going alone and partly because Mr. Black does not treat him like a fragile child. They make an odd pair on the subway. A small boy talking nonstop and a very old man moving slowly and watching.

I loved their walks together even when the plot slowed. Mr. Black helps Oskar get into buildings. He waits while Oskar asks questions. He does not push Oskar to talk about his dad, which makes Oskar talk about his dad more. There is a moment I half remember on a bench where Oskar admits how angry he is at his mom for laughing again and seeming okay. Mr. Black listens and does not correct him.

There is also tension because Mr. Black has his own reasons for going. He has not left his neighborhood in years. He wants to see the city once more before he cannot. He wants to be useful. Late in the book he decides to move to a nursing home or to leave the apartment, and Oskar takes it hard, as another abandonment.

If you have read reviews complaining the book uses cute friendships to dodge harder feelings, this pair is probably what they mean. I see the complaint. I still cared about both of them. The old man gave Oskar a way to be brave without pretending he was not scared.

Grandma across the street and grandpa who stopped talking

Interleaved with Oskar search are two sets of letters that explain the family history. They are slower and stranger than Oskar chapters, and they divided readers the most.

Oskar grandmother lives across the street and watches his apartment window with binoculars or just from her chair. She writes long letters to Oskar about her life. She grew up in Dresden. She lost her parents and her sister and her first love in the Allied bombing in February 1945. She came to America, married Thomas Schell Sr., Oskar grandfather, had a son, Thomas Jr., Oskar dad. The marriage was full of silences and rules. They marked off Nothing places in their apartment where they would not speak or touch. They slept in separate beds. They tried to love each other through shared loss and mostly failed.

The grandfather letters are addressed to Thomas Jr., the son he never met. Thomas Sr. left his pregnant wife and never came back until decades later. He writes about Dresden in fragments. He lost Anna, his girlfriend, who was pregnant when she died in the bombing. He could not speak about it, then almost could not speak at all. He tattooed YES on one hand and NO on the other so he could answer questions without talking. He worked as a jewelry salesman or a handyman depending on the year. He lived alone and wrote letters he never sent.

When he returns to New York in 2003 he rents the guest room in his ex wife apartment. He watches Oskar from afar. He follows him sometimes. He digs into Oskar life without introducing himself. At first this feels creepy. Then it feels sad. He wants to make amends but does not know how to ask.

I found these sections heavy. The Dresden passages are brutal. Foer writes them in short broken sentences with a lot of white space. Sometimes a page has only a few lines. Sometimes words run together or are replaced with numbers.

Here is where my criticism sharpens. I did not need every typographic trick. A few blank pages to show a man who cannot speak lands hard. The Dresden story also mirrors Oskar story a little too neatly. Both lose a loved one in a bombing from the sky. The parallel is clear early and Foer keeps underlining it. I wished he had trusted me to see it.

Still, the letters gave weight to Oskar parents. His dad was a child of two damaged people who tried to be cheerful and present anyway. His grandma survived a firestorm and then survived her son death on television. When she tells Oskar she watched the towers fall while knowing her son might be inside, that passage stopped me cold. No tricks on the page. Just plain sentences.

What the key fit and what Oskar did after

After months of searching, Oskar finds the match. I will keep the mechanics loose to avoid spoiling every step, but the key belonged to a man named William Black. His father had left a safe deposit box. The key had been in a vase that got sold at an estate sale. Thomas Schell had bought that vase secondhand. The key was never his. It was left inside by accident.

So the quest ends with a thud. The box holds a letter or a few papers from William father to William, apologies and instructions about money, nothing to do with Thomas or Oskar. William is kind about it. He even offers Oskar something from the box or tries to comfort him. Oskar feels embarrassed and furious. He wasted all that time. He bothered all those people. His dad was not sending him a message.

Around the same time Oskar learns his mom knew about the search all along. She had called ahead to many of the Blacks to say a boy might come by, to keep him safe without stopping him. She let him think he was independent while quietly protecting him. Oskar is angry at first, then relieved in a way he cannot say out loud. That reveal reframes a lot of earlier scenes. Those strangers were kinder than strange because his mom had warmed them up. I liked this twist. It made his mom smarter and more loving than Oskar had allowed.

Oskar also finally confronts the phone messages. He tells his grandma or writes it down, I recall him admitting he listened and hid the machine. The shame of that secret was worse than the messages themselves. He also admits he had a fight with his dad on the last night they spoke, said something cruel the way kids do, and never got to take it back.

The last part of the book moves fast. Oskar grandfather, Thomas Sr., helps Oskar do something Oskar has wanted for months. They go to the cemetery at night and dig up Thomas Jr. empty coffin, since his body was never recovered. They lower the hidden answering machine and some letters into the hole or lay them in the box. It is illegal and messy and not fully thought through, which is why it feels right for both of them. Two people who do not know how to apologize trying to give the dead something to hold.

Then comes the flipbook ending that everyone mentions. Oskar has printed out photos of a man falling from the towers. He reverses the order so that when you flip fast, the man rises instead of falls. He wishes his dad could have had more time. He imagines pulling his dad back through the window and locking the door. It is sentimental. It is also the most honest image of magical thinking after sudden death I have read. Kids and adults both replay the day and change one detail to save the person.

Does the book earn its ending. Partly. Oskar sleeps better. He lets Ron sit near him without flinching. He writes more gently to his grandma. His grandfather leaves again or stays at a distance, still broken but less hidden. His mom and he sit closer. No one is healed. They are just less alone in the apartment.

My fair complaints, gathered in one place so they are clear. Oskar voice stretches belief. The search relies on luck and kind strangers in a way that feels safer than real New York in 2003 would allow for a child alone, even with his mom calling ahead. The typography calls attention to itself. The Dresden material, powerful on its own, sometimes crowds out Oskar. And using 9/11 as the engine for a puzzle plot will feel exploitative to some readers. I understand that reaction even though the book moved me.

What stays with me anyway. The reconnaissance games as a portrait of good parenting. His grandma watching his window because watching is the only care she has left. Mr. Black turning his hearing aid back on to hear a boy talk. A mom who lets her son roam because stopping him would break him worse. A key that opens nothing for the person who needed it most, and still leads him back to his family.

I would hand this to someone who likes plot with their sorrow, and who does not mind a narrator who talks over you. If you want spare prose and strict realism, this will frustrate you. If you can live with a loud tender kid leading you borough to borough while two old people write the history he cannot yet carry, there is real ache here. I closed it thinking less about the mystery and more about listening. Who gets heard before they are gone. Who keeps the messages after.

FAQ

When was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close published and how long is it?

First published in 2005 by Houghton Mifflin in a 368 page edition. The post uses ISBN 9780618329700.

Who are the main people in Oskar search?

Oskar Schell, his dad Thomas who died on 9/11, his mom Linda, his grandma across the street, his returned grandpa Thomas Sr., and elder Mr. Black who walks with him.

Does the key lead to a message from Oskar father?

No. It opens William Black safe deposit box after being left in a sold vase. Oskar feels crushed, then learns his mom protected the search.