Spoilers!
Grief is a love spooled backward until it reaches the origin of the grief allowing you to prevent it from happening in the first place, but you can never quite reach back far enough. Grief is the pain of living and loving. Grief is the realization of life’s special precariousness; its smallness that is so full of bigness. Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, explores grief as an urban artifact to be unearthed, a grief so intimate to the person excavating, but in a particularly unique way, it’s also bound up in collective grief. One of the few notable fiction books that centers the tragedy of 9/11 as its catalyzing event, Foer’s book is a beautiful ode to that day, of course, but also, to every day that deserves to be lived extremely loud and incredibly close with our loved ones. Because every day — that current day with them and the own hopes and dreams of our own — is all we have. Foer’s books isn’t only one of the best books I’ve read so far in 2026, but one of the best books I’ve read in this one splendid, weird, painful lifetime of mine.
Oskar is a 9-year-old boy living in New York City who narrates part of the story. Set about two years after 9/11, we learn his father, Thomas Schell, was killed in one of World Trade Center towers. He was dismissed from school the day of the attacks, and when he came home, his father had left messages on the answering machine that phased from reassuring to panicky to that unnerving calm evocative of an awareness of one’s approaching death. Oskar hid those messages from his mother (so he thinks). Speaking of, his relationship to her is fraught due to the grief he carries for his father. Indeed, one explosive moment — and it seems clear that Oskar has a form of autism, given his desire to wear only white, the manner in which he speaks and interacts with his parents (and their grace), one of the meanings of the book’s title, and so on — sees Oskar tell his mother he wishes she had been the one that died that day instead of his father. Oskar bruises himself when he makes a mistake, like thinking he’s hurt his mother, or has feelings he doesn’t want to feel. The way in which he refers to this overflowing of feelings is his “boots are heavy.” After all, according to him, he only has so many tears in his Reservoir of Tears. And despite the aforementioned outburst toward his mother, the reason he hid the messages from her is that one of his raisons d’être is to protect her. He uses that phrase specifically because just prior to 9/11, his family did a vacation in France, so he likes peppering in some French phrases.
Among other things, including circling errors with a red pen in The New York Times, one of Oskar’s favorite activities with his father is essentially partaking in, and solving, a treasure hunt. He was already in the midst of one before 9/11, trying to find clues with his metal detector in Central Park, which is also tied to an apocryphal story his father told him about a Sixth Burrough in New York City that everyone’s forgotten about because all records were erased when the island drifted from Manhattan (and Central Park itself separated from that island, leaving a hole in the Burrough). After his father’s death, where they had to bury him in an empty casket, Oskar seeks to find some sort of clue left behind from his father that makes sense of anything, and mostly, that just helps him become closer with his dad again. He needs a purpose to work through his heavy boots. After he accidently breaks a blue vase in the back of his dad’s closet, he discovers an unknown key inside it. This is the mystery he needs! The key was in an envelope with the last name Black on it. Oskar, who likes fun facts about the world, especially things related to space and science, given his proclivity for writing Stephen Hawking inquiring to be one of his protégés, reasons through how many possible things that key could unlock in New York City and what the options could be. He cross-references that information with how many Blacks are listed in the phone book in the city, and reasons how long it will take him to walk to every Black and ask them if they know what the key opens. Walk? He’s obviously afraid of a terrorist attack on the subway. Oskar also takes photos along the way with his grandmother’s camera, which is why Foer’s book features photos throughout, including of the Blacks he meets (facing away from the camera), doorknobs, an extreme close-up of an elephant, and so on. Indeed, one section is filled with pictures from Oskar’s “Stuff That Happened to Me” that is his collection of benign photos (Stephen Hawking, blueprints for a paper airplane that could fly from his building to his grandmother’s) to the most disturbing one of all (one of the falling people during 9/11, who opted to jump out of the tower to their death versus suffer a smoke and molten heat death).
When he meets a new Black, Oskar gives them his business card, replete with all of his titles and interests, like inventor, jewelry designer, origamist, pacifist, percussionist, amateur astronomer (hence the letters to Hawking), but he’s also a collector of coins and Beatles memorabilia. He provides his email, but his phone is private and he doesn’t have a fax machine. Oskar being Oskar, and a child at that, is what provides some of the levity in the book.
Meanwhile, it should also be known that Oskar’s grandmother, Thomas’ mother, is also part of Oskar’s life and lives across the street in another building. Someone Oskar knows only as the mysterious renter occupies a lot of her time. She also narrates the story from the perspective of writing Oskar a letter about her life, his grandfather, and her son. We essentially know that Thomas’ father, also Thomas, was in love with the grandmother’s sister, Anna, during WWII when they all lived in Dresden, Germany. This was during the firebombing period, where the United States and Britain dropped thousands of tons of high-explosive incendiary bombs on the city. Nearly 25,000 German civilians were killed, including their respective parents, as well as a pregnant Anna. It’s profoundly compelling, and bold four years after 9/11, no less, to make part of the Schell story the Dresden firebombing. Foer later offers a detailed firsthand account of the confusion, madness, and horror witnessed by the grandfather as a survivor. In other words, in a book that centers 9/11 as its precipitating event, the only first-person account of a horrific, tragic event we do get is from the firebombing of a German city in 1945.
Ever since that event, the grandfather, dealing with his own grief, doesn’t talk anymore. Instead, he has “yes” and “no” written on his left and right hands, respectively. Or he otherwise shares his thoughts in his daybook. When Foer’s book picks up the story from the grandfather’s narration, the pages sometimes have a single word or phrase on them as a result. Or they descend into scribbles when he’s close to running out of pages. (The grandmother’s section has a style where she has extra spacing after each period, owing to her using a typewriter.) When he meets Oskar’s grandmother, it’s a peculiar relationship built around their shared grief, with myriad rules and designated “nothing” and “something” spaces. The grandfather is also a sculptor, who provocatively and intimately sculpts her. Then, he inexplicably leaves when he finds out she’s pregnant. He doesn’t return for 40 years, only returning upon the death of the son he never met due to 9/11.
One of the first Blacks Oscar meets is a deaf 103-year-old man, who hasn’t been outside in ages and hasn’t heard anything in ages. He never deigned to turn on his hearing aides until Oskar not only turns them on, but compels the old man to come along with him to meet the other Blacks and therefore, finally leave his apartment. They travel throughout New York City, and up, going to the top of the Empire State Building where another woman, also a Black, is dealing with the grief of losing her husband by surreptitiously stowing away inside the Empire State Building as an unofficial tour guide. Nobody knows anything about the key, but they are very courteous and helpful. The other notable thing about Oskar and the elder Black’s journey that ultimately lasts for eight months: Oskar’s mother doesn’t seem to care about his gallivanting around the city with a stranger at all hours of the day. More on that in a moment.
Oskar’s problem, though, as Foer so eloquently puts it, is, “I think and think and think, I thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.” He’s plagued by grief over his dad. Not just the fact of losing him and there not even being a body to bury, or that his mother seems to have moved on in his eyes with a guy named Ron who comes around (the mother explains that he’s just a friend she met a grief support group), but that, as we later learn, when Oskar came home on the “worst day ever,” it wasn’t merely to messages left by his father. His father called in that moment, and even seemed to be patiently imploring Oskar to pick up the phone. Oskar never did. He was too scared. That is the real source of his black hole of grief and unyielding shame. Who does he ultimately reveal this information, too? That gets us back to the key. It turns out, one of the first Blacks Oskar visited, her husband was also looking for Oskar, but didn’t realize it. Shortly before 9/11, Thomas Schell bought the blue vase from this Black, who was selling it as part of his recently deceased father’s estate sale. Thomas intended it as an anniversary gift for Oskar’s mother (set for after 9/11, sadly). Black then learned the blue vase held a key to a safety deposit box left behind by his estranged father that he now desperately wanted to learn what was inside. After Oskar’s 8-month journey, he discovers that this original Black is also trying to talk with him, and they do talk. Oskar reveals the messages and his story after hearing Black’s story. He gives Black the key. In other words, there was no satisfying answer to what the key opened or what it all meant because that’s the point! That thing that suddenly gives us purpose in the midst of our grief is purpose enough, or means enough, without having a broader purpose beyond keeping us living. That was a profound message from Foer. Even more profound is what’s evidenced in their conversation: the permeance of death in our lives. The age-old tragedy of the human experience is the gift of sentience, but the curse of that meaning we also recognize the finite nature of our existence and that we will die some day. As Oskar explains, while Black is talking about his father’s death, “I didn’t want to hear about death. It was all anyone talked about, even when no one was actually talking about.” Everything we talk about and do is ultimately in response to or in evasion of or to stave off death. This permeance of death is particularly compelling to me, as I alluded to at the start, with how collective grief affects an individual’s grief journey. That is, the grandparents didn’t lose their grandparents and Anna in some localized tragic accident; they lost them in a world-historic firebombing during a world-historic world war. Likewise with Oskar, he didn’t lose his father in one of the ways we’ve come to think of as normal in day-to-day life, but in a world-historic terrorist attack that also took the lives of 2,976 others. Throughout the book, we have echoes of that collective witnessing of 9/11, like the Germans watching it unfolding on public TVs, or how the news kept replaying the footage of the plane going into the building and the towers themselves falling, or the repeated imagery of the person falling from the tower. How do you square, if at all, your individual grief with the collective grief and the responsibility of the latter therein? Foer’s book isn’t per se about the latter, but his answer to the former is still applicable to the latter: community, being together, and living extremely loud and incredibly close.
During the course of his journey with the various Blacks, Oskar also discovers the “renter” at his grandmother’s house, who is, of course, his grandfather. They then come to a solution (?) to their grief: what if they dug up the grave? I’m not sure what they were expecting to find, but even though Oskar knew the coffin would be empty, it still surprised him when it was. For his part, the grandfather brings all the letters he’s been writing the son he never met and buries them in the coffin. As for why the mom didn’t seem to care or was aloof about what Oskar was up to, it was the opposite. She knew exactly what Oskar was doing, and she helped him by calling every single Black before he set out on this journey to explain what Oskar was doing and why they were about to get a knock on the door from her son. That’s why they were all so nice and welcoming when this 9-year-old kid showed up asking bizarre questions, and some even almost gave it away by referring to him by name despite him not giving them his name (he notices this sometimes, but doesn’t linger on the thought). What a lovely mother. Maybe that helped her work through her grief, too. (The grandfather was also following Oskar throughout the city to watch out for him, so much so that the elderly Black accosted him until the grandfather explained who he was.)
Both Oskar and his grandmother imagine if their tragic events never occurred; if the Dresden bombing and 9/11 never happened, and their people were still alive (but then, would Thomas be alive, as well as Oskar, if Anna never died?). So, then, the book ends with the falling man at the bottom of the page and in flipbook style, he floats back to the top of the building and presumably to safety. Grief means repeating the two-word phrase “if only” repeatedly, at least when the one-word question “why?” doesn’t suffice.
Foer’s book is a must-read book, and again, even though it is full of pain and tragedy from opposite human experience perspectives (a grandmother and a grandfather versus that of a child), there are still moments of levity, loveliness, and tenderness throughout. After all, that is the duality of life. The pain with the love. The brokenness with the tenderness. The gaping hole with the muchness of it all. Do yourself a favor, especially on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and read this book.
Milam's Musings 