Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Overview

Jonathan Safran Foer's second novel follows Oskar Schell, a precocious, anxious nine-year-old still reeling from the death of his father in the September 11 attacks. When Oskar finds a key hidden in an envelope marked "Black" inside his father's closet, he becomes convinced it holds a final message meant for him alone. Certain the key belongs to a lock somewhere in the city, he sets out to find it.

The search becomes an odyssey through New York's boroughs, as Oskar knocks on the doors of strangers who share his father's surname, collecting fragments of their lives along the way. His journey is shadowed by what he calls his "heavy boots," his private language for grief, and shadowed too by a second, older story: that of his grandparents, whose own losses decades earlier echo forward into Oskar's search for meaning.

Told partly through Oskar's voice and partly through letters, photographs, and typographic experiments, the novel moves between comedy and devastation as it asks what survives when someone is gone, and what an inheritance of loss actually looks like passed from one generation to the next.

A Novel of Inherited Grief

Foer wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in the shadow of an event that was, at the time, barely a decade past, and the novel's central risk was formal as much as emotional: could a child's idiosyncratic, invention-obsessed narration carry the weight of a national trauma without trivializing it? The book's answer is to refuse a single register. Oskar's chatty, gadget-filled inner monologue sits beside blank pages, doubled text, and images that interrupt the prose, formal gestures meant to render experiences, silence, absence, overwhelm, that ordinary sentences struggle to hold.

That structural ambition placed the novel alongside a wave of early-2000s American fiction attempting to represent 9/11 without reducing it to spectacle, and it drew comparisons, not always favorable, to Foer's own debut, Everything Is Illuminated, which similarly braided a young protagonist's quest with a buried family history from an earlier war. Critics were split on whether the whimsy served the grief or undercut it, but the book found a wide readership and enough cultural traction to be adapted into a 2012 film starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock. Within Foer's body of work, it marks a hinge point: the last of his novels before he turned, in Eating Animals, from fiction to nonfiction argument, though the same preoccupation with what one generation owes the next runs through both.

Why Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Has Been Challenged

Objections to the novel have centered less on its 9/11 subject matter than on specific passages readers and committees have flagged as inappropriate for the age group typically assigned the book. Chief among them is a sexually explicit scene involving adult characters, along with scattered profanity in dialogue, both cited as unsuitable for middle- and high-school classrooms and libraries. Some challenges have also pointed to the book's unflinching treatment of death, trauma, and suicide, arguing that its emotional intensity and disturbing imagery make it too heavy for younger or more vulnerable readers.

Others have objected on narrower grounds tied to the novel's experimental presentation, worrying that its blended text and imagery, or the frankness with which it handles grief, require more guidance or context than a school setting can provide. Taken together, these are the recurring threads behind the book's inclusion on restricted or removed lists nationally, a title that this catalog tracks as challenged in 9 states and 28 districts, rather than any single, uniform complaint.