anti:freeze

I was forced to flee a cafe today, when it became clear I was teetering on the edge of a big release, with tears I could not contain.

As many of you know, I wrote my critical paper for Antioch about art after 9-11, and since then, I have kept my eye on literature exploring the attacks.

So I was excited to start reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer.

I was not prepared for the twists in my guts, the raw eyes, the reopening of unhealed wounds. I was not prepared to love the narrator so wholly, or for the images to reach right into my heart and squeeze the ventricles.

This book may be a novel, but it feels more true (whatever that means) - more wrenching and raw and sweet and haunting - than most of the books I call "nonfiction."

All this, and Safron Foer has also accomplished the amazing feat of writing a real child's voice - not just in emotional tenor, but in the sheer velocity of images and ideas, thoughts and inventions. The kid does things we all did (and then some), but that is not exactly what makes it so poignant. Always, in every image, you can feel his loss.

How perfect that the narrator finds a key without a lock. How much more moving, that he must find the right lock for his key, instead of the other way around. That he searches for negative space. For the right question, instead of the right answer.

Please, please, please read this book.