This book gave me heavy boots

In Foer’s exploration of 9/11, young Oskar Schell seeks some closure on his father’s death by going on a quest throughout New York City to trace a person named Black who may have some knowledge of his father. In the meantime, different narratives trace the complicated relationship between Oskar’s grandparents. His grandfather, Thomas, does not speak, communicating solely through writing and his grandmother feigns poor eyesight to try to elicit communication and attention from him. He leaves her when she reveals that she is pregnant because he does not love her enough, but he returns when he realizes he has had no sort of life without her anyway. Oskar desperately seeks connection with his dead father while neglecting the living mother he has behind.

The entire book is really a story of people communicating at cross-purposes or not communicating at all. They don’t tell each other the words they need to hear (I love you, I need you, I understand your pain, I’m scared, I can’t do this, I need help) and in the process systematically lose their ability to communicate. Take grandfather Thomas. His inability to say what he needs to say, to explore his own grief over losing Anna, ends up shutting down his entire capacity to communicate verbally.

Written communication runs as a theme throughout the book (understandable for a novel), and while it has elements of an epistolary novel, it retains far too much of Oskar’s narrative to be purely epistolary—though that would have been a logical direction for Foer to take, given his intense focus on documentation-as-substitute-for-direct-interaction in the story. Thomas writes thousands of letters to the son he never meets and writes page after page in his daybooks to communicate with people. Oskar keeps a collection of “Stuff That Happened To Me”—documents and images that define his self-conception (and that fill the book itself). He writes letters to strangers that he admires constantly, in a relentless search for approval and connection. In the end, his grandmother can’t say the things she wants to say to his face—she writes him a letter. Oskar only has the key that he finds in his father’s things, the impetus for his quest, because a man cannot open a letter from his dead father in time. Oskar is haunted by the things his father didn’t say in his final phone messages. He is incapacitated when the phone rings and loses the opportunity to speak to him a final time and hear what he really needs to hear—that his father loves him, something that it seems no one in this book (except Oskar’s mother) can say in a timely fashion.

The lesson learned is both bittersweet and clear: seize the opportunity to SAY what you need to say—make your needs clear, don’t be afraid to ask for help and above all, tell the important people in your life exactly what they mean to you every chance you get because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.