I recently read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. He also wrote Everything Is Illuminated, which I did not read but did watch, and Here I Am, which I have but haven’t read yet. I’ve also read Moonwalking with Einstein, which isn’t by him at all, but is by his brother, Joshua. My cover of EL&IC is very pretty and tells me that it is now a major motion picture, and I suppose it is. It came out in 2011 and I haven’t seen it.

Frank Kermode wrote in the second half of the 20th century about the sense of an ending; how every tick of the clock implies a tock. The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman, was written in the mid 1700s by Lawrence Sterne, and is a novel that plays with the page as much as it does with digression. My thesis for my master’s had nothing at all to do with Tristam Shandy, but it did focus on the work of Frank Kermode, and how the sense of, and trust in, endings faltered following the first world war, and failed after the second. When the war to end all wars is just the end of the page and not the end of the chapter – much less the book, you tend to get pretty fucked up about where the end is and what it is.

I looked at how narrative structure was prised apart, and how more and more stories began in medias res, and never found their way home. The tick, forever left on tenterhooks for that tock. Something else that I noticed was the blank spaces – sometimes literal, but not always – significant pieces that struggled to materialize. Weighted down into the black depths of unconsciousness by the trauma the character suffered. I looked at John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy (42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money), and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children’s Crusade. Dos Passos wrote following the first world war, and Vonnegut wrote following the second. Dos Passos plays with style; newsreels, newspaper excerpts, almost stream-of-consciousness character conversations, dry biography. Vonnegut used time and temporal dislocation to lay stark the effects of war, drawing on his own experience when he survived the bombing of Dresden over the course of three days in February of 1945.

The boy, Oskar, is the most beloved boy in the city, it seems. We’re back talking about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close now. It doesn’t seem like it follows (a non-sequitur), but you can trust me that it will all come together. Oskar Schell, we find out immediately, invents. We sit within his mind, and utterly without control, follow his narrative. He invents because, I think, to invent is to do, to have the agency to not be lost or afraid. Oskar’s grandfather, Thomas Schell, and his grandmother, who isn’t named, came from Dresden following the war. They survived the war; the only survivors from their families. Thomas loses the ability to speak over time – a result of his trauma, and eventually begins writing letters to his unborn son even as he abandons his wife while she’s still pregnant. Oskar’s grandmother writes letters to Oskar, once she also decides to leave, but that part comes much later. I think that Oskar’s grandmother isn’t named because she spends her entire life being for others. Thomas was in love with her sister Anna (who is named many, many times in the book, in Thomas’ letters), who did not survive, and who was pregnant with their child when she died. Oskar’s grandmother found Thomas in New York some time after the war and needed him to need her. A piece of her past. We don’t know what she looks like, because that isn’t important to Oskar, and Thomas can only think of what Anna looks like – sculpting Anna when he is attempting to sculpt her. Oskar needs her solidity, her love, her presence. So she is reassuringly present for him. She tells Oskar she hopes he never loves anyone as much as she loves him. She is the shape of a grandmother, the way a keyhole holds the shape of a key but is not itself a key.

Oskar inherits trauma from his grandparents, but it lurks unseen as he grows up with his mother, Linda, who always looks like she’s smiling (nearly her only description in the book), and his father, Thomas, who is mythic. We know a lot about Thomas, this Thomas, who runs the family jewelry store, and loves to correct the New York Times with a red pen, and invents epic puzzles for his son.

Oskar acquires trauma when his father dies on September 11th.

Oskar acquires trauma when he is home to hear his father leave his last message on the answering machine, while in the world trade center, and is too scared to pick up the phone and talk to him.

Oskar invents to bury the hurt of his father leaving him, and his own betrayal of not picking up the phone, though who could blame him, he’s only a child and he couldn’t pick up the phone because it couldn’t be real, it just couldn’t. But then it was, and it is.

Oskar’s grandfather, Thomas, writes letters to his son, Thomas, who he never knew. Though Thomas says that Thomas came to visit him in Dresden when he was a young man, Thomas may be wrong, and may have just wished that Thomas wanted to see him, needed to see him, and maybe could forgive him. The letters that Thomas writes remind me a lot of John Dos Passos’ narrative style, with long run-on sentences, which remain unhampered by endings, endings that might seal the sentence into a meaning that might not be right, that might be wrong. So he writes and writes and writes, and remember, he cannot talk.

When Oskar’s grandmother begins to write to Oskar, when she leaves later with his grandfather, she writes like poetry. In places, you can read each line down the page, or each line up the page, and you end up in the same place.

Oskar’s grandparents don’t tell the same stories. They tell the same stories, I should say, but they don’t remember the stories the same way, so they’re not the same at all. They tell their stories marked with the imprint of the other, but they don’t realize they never really knew the other, so the imprint is imprecise. The blank spaces they create, the voids, aren’t reliable. They don’t know what they don’t know, and don’t know they don’t know it. But they know the other has a void, and so desperately tries to find ways to scribble into existence what was never there and never expected to be there. It’s messy and it’s complicated, but to shatter what they’ve got in the moment is terrifying to consider, so they avoid, avoid, avoid.

Oskar is trying to find the tock, the last answer to the last puzzle his father ever left him, but he’s unstuck from his own story and can’t. He can’t because he never could. The puzzle he thought he saw was just a palimpsest of other events in his father’s life that never mattered at all.

Except they matter, in that through the pursuit of the puzzle that isn’t, Oskar discovers humanity, narrowly, through the lens of everyone with the last name Black in the five boroughs. Which eventually brings him home again. Where he recognizes his mother’s love for him, through what she didn’t say to him, and through what she did say to others for him.

Oskar’s parents, Linda and Thomas, seem normal. They seem to be typical adults, raising their son together, in a large city. They work, they come home and spend time with their kid, and they do it all over again. They teach him what they know, and help encourage him and his personality to bloom. Oskar’s grandparents, however, are not normal in this sense. His grandmother loves Oskar as she loved her son, and cares for her daughter-in-law, but she lives in the shadow of her dead sister, and with the physical presence of the absence of her husband. Oskar’s grandfather Thomas loves his son he nearly never meets, and loves Oskar from a distance, but cannot break through his own trauma to express himself, not even to his wife. They’re both indelibly marked forever by the bombing of Dresden, a horror they can’t ever get past. Oskar knows nothing of this until 9/11, and as the days following unfolded he was baptized into carrying the crushing understanding of all war and human destruction, just as his grandparents were. He’s better able to understand the world around him, because as terrible as things can be, they can also be pure and beautiful. The flapping of twenty or more birds at once, following a long silence. A fantastical story, that feels true. An empty coffin, filled with a father’s love.

I think that Thomas did track down his father, Thomas, in Dresden. One letter that is shown in the book is marked with a red pen. This is younger Thomas’ trademark – to edit the New York Times, so surely he would edit his father’s letter. This is the only letter that Thomas actually mails, and he addresses it to Thomas, not to his wife. I think that Thomas read the letter, edited it, and sifted through the meaning to find his father and go meet him. We will never know what he thought or felt, and his father, Thomas, is too unreliable to relate the normality of the meeting. Thomas didn’t tell his father who he was, but his father felt the truth, and couldn’t bear the truth to be spoken. So they had an unremarkable afternoon together, meeting for the first and only time that they ever would. Remarkable only, I suppose, in that it was unremarkable, and the dense press of everything unsaid left the distinct shapes of two Thomases who were father and son.

Oskar does the thing his grandparents struggled to do for decades. He tries even though he’s scared. His last holdout of trying to understand is his mother. He doesn’t want to understand why she’s spending time with Ron. He wants to hold his hurt close, because it lets him feel the last way he felt when his father was alive. It’s the closest he can feel to his father. And, he wants his mother to freeze in time, to be in love with his dad, and be the exact person she was the day before it happened. But she isn’t, and it is his struggle to not understand and not accept that drives him – both to try to keep his father close, and away from his mother. Even while he desperately needs her. In the end, he finds that she has protected him and kept him safe, though she never showed it, and let him take his hero’s journey alone, how he needed to. And so the last wall fell for Oskar; he stopped resisting understanding his mother’s need to move on, and began to move beyond his trauma finally as well.