A Few Questions Answered

Hi again--

I appreciate all the comments on the excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I've received some great questions, so I wanted to answer a few of them here.

Jonathan

How did the idea for the novel originate?

Very organically. It began with a museum, actually. A once-famous European writer disappeared for forty years, and then reappeared. Over the course of successive rewrites--as my passions and sense of writing changed, and as the world changed--the novel was destroyed and rebuilt many times. The writer and museum fell by the wayside. A precocious young boy in a damaged city took center stage. I've written thirty-nine distinct drafts of this book. Like a boat whose every plank is replaced while journeying at sea, the first and last drafts have nothing tangible in common--no characters, themes or plot--and yet are one in the same. And to get to the 400 or so pages that ultimately comprise the novel, I had to write well over 2,500. Which is to say the boat has been an aircraft carrier, at times. It's been a volatile process.

To make a long story short, I've tried to follow my instincts. I've tried to write the book I would want to read, rather than the book I would want to write. I've tried never to ask if something was smart, but instead if it felt genuine. A set of themes rose to the surface: silence, invention, anxiety, naivete absence, the difficulty of expressing love, war...I felt I couldn't push them down, and I chose not to try to. Voices became pronounced. Some characters became vivid, others vanished. A plot... happened. If it's sounds inefficient, I've described it properly. I cannot imagine how I could have been less efficient. But maybe inefficiency is the point. One can use a map and drive to a destination. Or one can follow the most interesting, beautiful roads--trusting oneself, trusting the car, and trusting the logic of the pavement--and end up where you couldn't have realized you wanted to be until you got there. Writing, for me, is about following roads. And that intuitive, wandering approach explains not only why this book is so far from where I started, but why I feel it so personally, so viscerally, and so, well, loudly and closely.

Where does the character of Oskar come from? Were you at all like him? Are you still?

My parents have a photograph of me on their refrigerator. I'm about six years old, asleep on the sofa, wearing a plaid blazer, a blue sequined bowtie, and rings on each of my ten fingers. Apparently, the look was indicative of my sense of fashion for about a year. That photograph was one of my major sources of inspiration for Oskar. As for how much I actually was like him, it's hard to say. Like most children, I had a number of collections. And I suppose my interests tended toward the esoteric, and my style toward the precocious and annoying. I sent my share of fan letters, suffered numerous failed attempts to kiss women my mother's age, and did work in the family jewelry business for a summer...Am I still like that? Fortunately, or unfortunately, most of Oskar has been civilized out of me.

What's the significance of the title?

I like titles that contribute to the meaning of the book, rather than describe the book's contents. Which is to say I'm not going to have a great answer to this question, any more than I'd be able to describe the significance of Oskar. Oskar is Oskar. The title is the title. But that's a bit annoying. Maybe I could say that things in the novel are loud and close. War is loud and close--for Oskar's grandparents, who survived the firebombing of Dresden, and for Oskar, who lost his father in the World Trade Center attacks. The future is loud and close. Love is loud and close. And many things are silent and far away. There are mute characters, and characters who can't hear. Characters who travel halfway around the world to be distant from those they love, and characters who endlessly wander the city in an attempt to get home. And then there are the things--like Oskar's relationship with his father--that are simultaneously loud and silent, and close and far away...

In reference to the novel itself, I hope the reader feels it loudly and closely. If I had a good voice, and all the time in the world, I'd like to sing my thoughts and feelings directly into people's ears. Given that my voice is terrible, and time is limited--and who would want me that close to their face, anyway?--I write the best substitute I can.