Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (28 page)

In a striking sequence in the second volume, we come upon an Artie with writer’s block. He’s already published the first volume and has become famous, with film offers and entrepreneurs seeking him out, but he can’t go on with this and seeks the aid of a psychiatrist. We see Artie regressing even in size, becoming a shrinking maus, needing Mommie, unequal to the circumstances, in trouble. And we see the trouble itself in one unforgettable frame: the world-famous writer wearing his maus mask—all identity is mask, he suggests—sits at his drawing desk, telling us about foreign editions and film and TV offers, reminding us as well that Mother killed herself in 1968, letting us know he’s feeling depressed, but the floor of this frame is littered with maus cadavers, with naked maus bodies, such as the ones that littered the camps and became the awful photographs that all of us have seen. And we understand the paralysis of the writer:
this is his material
. It is as if he were a vampire or a ghoul, feeding on corpses. Maybe that is what it means when the son writes the life of a dying father: feasting on the dead.

That is the fate of the children of the Holocaust. They find themselves, without ever having experienced any of the horrors firsthand, filled with corpses nonetheless. And so one begins where one always begins, knowingly or not, with the corpse closest to home, the cantankerous old man who cannot be lived with but who cannot be allowed to be forgotten. How to get his story? How to get it right? By finding images for the reign of systemic, dismembering sacrifice that preceded you, you elect to remember, to do homage to the lifeline that stayed intact. Maybe then you could spring clear, exit the pit.

Thus you realize, as an opening gambit, the incipit to the cathartic work to come, that the world is to be shown as multi-specied. You will also be dealing with the fact (demonstrated every day) that fathers and sons constitute different species as well and that your book is the only way possible—conversation won’t do it—to bring these different creatures from the same family together. Thus it will turn out that the final link between living beings is a narrative link: the son-scribe creates the life story of the father-survivor. It is exhausting labor for both son and father. Vladek asks, at story’s end, to stop the tape recorder, saying that he’s tired from talking. And he calls Artie “Richieu,” saying “it’s
enough
stories for now.” The story has been told, the dead son and the living son merge. The last frame shows the Spiegelman grave, listing the birth and death dates of Vladek and Anja. Perhaps the ghosts are at rest now, thanks to the labors of the American son. Many of us, most of us, will be called upon to bury our parents. Artie does a good bit more: he births them in literature. Maybe this, too, is how one grows up.

For many Americans September 11, 2001, was the day mass death came to our shores, and it seems fair to say that we are still working our way through this tragedy, which altered our country forever.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
, which appeared in 2005, the second novel of the extravagantly talented Jonathan Safran Foer, offers us a child’s view of this apocalyptic event but does so in a zany, sometimes manic, sometimes pretentious postmodern style, a freewheeling circuslike account of Oskar Schell’s coming to terms with the death of his father, Thomas, in the Twin Towers.

Oskar can seem cloying, with his white clothes and tambourine, his mix of nerdhood and scientific genius, his peculiar habit of telling women how beautiful they are and writing letters to worthies such as Stephen Hawking, but he is there to bear witness. Foer’s story of 9/11 is systematically cut with that of the Dresden firebombing and even Hiroshima, reminding us that disaster regularly parses human history and that children are its most poignant victims. (Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
and Günter Grass’s
The Tin Drum
are evident models here.) Finally, the book is larded with high jinks: typographic liberties, blank pages, bizarre photographs, morphing print, the incorporation of seemingly banal images such as keys, doorknobs, and other realia that undergird Oskar’s quest narrative, and, as an unforgettable closing suite, the graphic reversal of time, space, gravity, and death whereby the (multipixeled) falling body
rises
, page by page, back into the very tower that is being undoomed in front of our eyes. (Another salute to Vonnegut.) Yet this is a book that will endure. Even its wildest posturings make a strange sort of sense when it comes to measuring the immeasurable, making sense of the absurd.

Foer’s
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
presents mass destruction as the jagged, never-to-be-repaired wrenching apart of the human family. Oskar Schell stays in our mind as one of the walking wounded, and Foer makes us understand that an injured but gifted child is an astonishing lens through which to revisit horror. This hurt child is bubbling over with inventions for making the world better—he cooks them up at night when he can’t sleep, which is often—and they display something of this book’s luminousness: hearts that talk directly to one (requiring only microphones and speakers), skin that changes color to announce what it’s feeling underneath, “Nature Hike Anklets” that leave a trail of bright dye so you would never get lost, ambulances that broadcast (for everyone to hear) how the injured party inside is faring, skyscrapers that move up and down while elevators stay in place, “because if you’re on the ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits below you, the building could take you to the ground, and everyone could be safe.”

There’s nothing easy about the fantasy in play here. His bright, meliorist recipes have blood on them. History changes us, pain teaches, disaster spawns creativity, but the entire consort is death-driven. Oskar’s responses are not limited to the ludic inventions I’ve listed. He is hurt in far more familiar ways. He refuses to take public transit because it is “an obvious target.” He becomes a specialist in how other species react to trauma and death, informing us that a cat falling from the twentieth floor of a building has a better chance of survival than one thrown from the eighth, because it takes eight floors for the animal to realize what’s happening and to position itself. He is interested in the legendary memory of elephants and speaks of researchers playing the call of a dead elephant to its family members, resulting in the elephants approaching ever closer. He takes to school a recorded interview with a Hiroshima survivor, a mother who looked everywhere for her lost daughter and found her with her skin peeling off, maggots everywhere in her wounds. That gruesome account is followed by the reactions of Oskar’s classmates: the girls weep, the boys make “funny barfing noises.” Foer does not let us forget that most kids have no stomach for horror—except those whom it has wrecked.

The novel’s basic plot consists of Oskar’s far-flung search for the truth of Dad’s death, a truth that might set his son free:

This is almost Conradian or Faulknerian in its sense of alternate possibilities, yet it captures the tortured imagination of the children of disaster, doomed to act out (inwardly) whatever new data about cataclysm come their way, thanks to the prodigious information output made possible in our time. When three thousand people die, many scenarios become available for haunting the living. Uncertainty spawns plots, whether they be those of jealousy or of grieving.

Oskar’s most preciously guarded secret—the one that is causing him the most misery—is the series of phone calls that Dad made in the last hour of his life, calls that only Oskar knows about, because he had returned home to their apartment and listened to them. Arriving at 10:22, he listened to five earlier messages—from 8:52, 9:12, 9:31, 9:46, and 10:04, each from Dad saying “I’m still okay, things will work out”—and at 10:26:47 the phone rang again: it was Dad’s last call, and Oskar could not take it. He listened to the answering machine, heard Dad’s voice asking over and over “Are you there? Are you there? Are you there?” and couldn’t pick up the phone. At 10:28 the phone went silent, for that was when the building went down; then Oskar took the phone, wrapped it up and hid it, and replaced it with a similar one, cleansed of the terrible tidings. He wonders if there can be forgiveness for this failure of nerve, heart, and love.

Hence the precious precocious prattle of Oskar Schell, the white-clothed, smart aleck, genius-nerd, covers some basic home truths. Some of them are familiar. Mom’s relationship with her new friend Ron, her effort to get past the tragedy, is unforgivable, and the grieving Hamlet-like son lets her know it, over and over, even to the tune of putting the knife in as deeply as he knows how when he informs her, “If I could have chosen, I would have chosen you.” Ground zero: you should have died, not Dad. Yes, he regrets this, yet it is only fair, since he also suspects that Mom harbors the same horrible thought: “If she could have chosen, it would have been my funeral we were driving to.” Tit for tat. Lives lost acquire a heinous market value: yours is worth less than his, mine should have been the lost one. That is what happens when a family is riven. Wires get crossed, guilt can be neither expressed nor overcome, one can’t get clear. Dr. Fein, the psychiatrist on the case, tries his level best, and Oskar gives him an earful: his emotions are going haywire, he’s panicky away from Mom, he’s not good with people, his insides and his outsides (Oskar’s own terms) don’t match up. Dr. Fein, Freudian that he is, wonders if puberty might be involved, but the boy has a different theory: “It’s because my dad died the most horrible death that anyone ever could invent.” Still trying, the good doctor asks if something good might come of Dad’s death; Foer writes Oskar’s response like this:

The doctor cannot cure the boy, but he can add to his terrors, as we see in the follow-up scene, where Oskar overhears portions of Mom’s conversation with the physician, as the shrink delivers (via Foer’s truncated, overheard-through-the-door rendition) his verdict: home is not a safe environment for this child; maybe he’s suicidal, he should be hospitalized. We can scarcely avoid seeing that the manic and ludic elements of the book can be coded pathologically, that this child is a candidate for being institutionalized, for going under permanently. But he doesn’t. At book’s end, when the quest gives out, Oskar seems to have reached a plateau, to have made progress in his grieving, so that he can now cry in Mom’s arms, admit to her that he’s terrified of being hospitalized, and even gesture toward a possible future: “It’s OK if you fall in love again.”

Yet I think the book will be most remembered for its sound and fury, not its closing hints at mellowness. Arguably the most bloodcurdling moment of the text is when Oskar, playing Yorick in the school version of
Hamlet
, goes over the edge and explodes: tired of being dead, Yorick strikes back by taking Jimmy Snyder’s (Hamlet’s) face into his hand and unloading. We read: