A nine-year-old Oskar Schell steers New York City on a quest to find the secrets of a mysterious key and its connection to his father, who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 09/11.  Since his father’s death, Oskar struggles with insomnia, panic attacks, and depression. He often describes the feeling of depression as wearing heavy boots and deals with this by giving himself bruises. The novel is an exploration of grief set against the cultural backdrop of post-09/11 America, mixed with secondary narrations by Oskar’s grandparents, whose lives parallel their grandson’s in significant ways. Oskar lives in Manhattan with his mother, who is often very busy with work. His relationship with his mother has also become strained, as she has started dating a man named Ron, whom he resents for replacing his father. His overly protective Grandma lives across the street. An extremely emotional and intelligent child, Oskar is often over-stimulated by his environment, and often falls victim to his many fears and phobias. His natural eccentricities have only been exacerbated in the wake of his father’s death, which haunts him constantly.

Oskar finds a mysterious key in a vase in his father’s closet, into an envelope with the name Black on it and he plans a quest to find its purpose, hoping that by finding its owner, he might find out more about his father’s last days. He makes a list with all the persons from New York with the family name Black.  He interviews some interesting and eccentric characters along the way, including Abby Black, who seems to know more about the key than she is willing to admit, and Mr. Black, an old man who agrees to accompany him on the journey.

The secondary narrations of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tell Thomas Schell Sr.’s (Oskar’s grandpa), he writes letters to his son (Oskar’s father), whom he abandoned before Thomas Jr. was born. Grandma’s narration is also written in the form of letters. She writes to Oskar about her life as a young girl in Dresden, as an immigrant in New York City, and as a wife to the Grandpa he has never known. The novel has many photographs from Oskar’s scrapbook.

In an interview, Foer stated, “I was working on another story and I just started to feel the drag of it. And so, as a side project, I got interested in the voice of this kid. I thought maybe it could be a story; maybe it would be nothing. I found myself spending more and more time on it and wanting to work on that”. On the challenges of writing a novel in a child’s voice, Foer responded, “It’s not the voice of a child exactly,” adding that “in order to create this thing that feels most real, it’s usually not by actually giving the most accurate presentation of it.” The book was published in 2005 by Mariner Books. Despite several unfavorable reviews, the novel was viewed positively by several critics. Foer’s child narrator was featured in a critical article titled “Ten of the Best Child Narrators” by John Mullan of The Guardian in 2009. John Updike’s 2005 review of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, written for The New Yorker, praises Foer’s imaginative storytelling but suggests that the novel’s core message is lost amid the clutter of visual distractions.

Personally, I loved the novel. I’m naturally drawn to those people who are overwhelmed by existence, who, for them, life seems to be almost too much: for whom the mystery of life and love and foreverness and the past and all of it is just overwhelming to the point in which one wishes one could scream so loud that it would just make it all go away. Sometimes, I feel chased by the immensity of what it means to be alive on earth and to live amongst and around all these people and memories and ghosts and all the potential and possibilities. May times I think life itself is a messy affair and somehow that’s what this book is about. This book gave me so mixed feelings, just as A little life, by Hanya Yanagihara. These are the kind of books that make you cry and disturbs you profoundly, it makes you question all your feelings, defies you, but at the end of it you get your shit together and you move on, but you’re never the same again.

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”

“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”

“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”

“So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”

“I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.”

“You can’t love anything more than something you miss.”

“I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it’s in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.”

“In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.”

“I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.”

“We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things…”