The Accidental v. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
presented by
ROUND 4, ZOMBIE ROUND
The Accidental
v. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Judged by Rosecrans Baldwin
Finally, a contest between apples and oranges (!). Between two books that depend on clever wordplay and story design to tell us about their characters and how they fit in the world! Two books where characters tell stories to themselves and the rest of us to keep the world at bay when too often the world disappoints, injures, or frightens us! Hooray!
(None of those exclamation marks are meant sarcastically. I really enjoyed both books and it was exciting to compare them and see how they were similar. Hooray!)
With Foer I had more fun. With Smith I was more entangled. Entertainment or enlightenment—how to choose? I prize Philip Roth as much as John Le Carré, Iris Murdoch as much as Patricia Highsmith (and Graham Greene more than the rest of them, if only for The End of the Affair), so it’s a toss-up.
Do I choose the book I couldn’t put down or the one I couldn’t forget?
Extremely Loud has a young boy, Oskar, grappling with the death of his father (note: who died on Sept. 11), whom he believes left behind a puzzle for Oskar to solve by traveling around meeting strangers in New York City. In The Accidental a family on holiday takes in a mysterious vagabond who shakes them all up just when they’re fizzing anyway. Style is paramount in both books with each narrator (there are several in both stories) in possession of his or her own style of describing the world (think Sound & Fury, Chaucer, that schizophrenic cousin who frightened you as a kid). In Foer’s book there’s also lots of clever graphic trickery (which I enjoyed a lot—why must novels always be vanilla?), and in Smith’s there’s lots of clever motif weaving and herky-jerky Mark Morris dancer-esque relating of consciousness. What else—Foer’s story flies by present-tense for the most part, while Smith’s is largely remembered in slowly teased fragments.
(If each book had a surrogate for its author embedded in the spine controlling things, Foer’s would be some teenage magician with expensive exploding cards; Smith’s would be a heavy gray brain nostalgic for its former body’s sex life. Both novels are so heavy in style, in-your-face about construction, so extremely deliberate and structurally didactic, Roth’s The Counterlife or, again, Sound & Fury, look subtle in comparison.)
Am I a sucker for realism, or do I simply hate being smacked by the scaffolding?
But both authors possess their stories. Nothing is half-baked or squirmed over. Foer’s book is extremely sure of itself and surprisingly fun and funny in parts. It errs, though, on slightness. The roles of Dresden and 9/11 never seem significant. Trickery becomes too clever (and heartless) very fast. Foer also has a hard time with subtle tempo changes, and when he slows down I don’t find the story skidding on much I recognize as emotionally real. Oskar and his grandmother talking on their walkie-talkies—yes; Oskar’s mother discussing her new boyfriend—yes; but so many times a very deeply intoned, no way.
(Am I a sucker for realism, or do I simply hate being smacked by the scaffolding?)
Smith plays slow. How her sentences are built tells as much about her characters as what’s actually being said. This made the book richly satisfying, particularly because Smith is so handy with a reveal; it also exhausted me. Every chapter I skipped paragraphs, whole pages. All the mental unraveling of a scene’s clues and references felt too much like I was stuck talking to that geekiest friend of mine who can reference a film, an anecdote, a piece of news trivia, and his girlfriend’s agility with parallel-parking all in the same review of a new album. Too much Christmas; too much figgy pudding; too many motifs and cues and CONTEXT-CURRENTLY-BEING-PROVIDEDs.
But then, many times I loved (in a very relaxed, succumbed, “I-remember-why-I-love-reading” kind of way) Smith’s hand with surprise and dialogue. Her characters have their bodies filled in, and their shadows, too. I carried them around with me for a week.
It wasn’t an easy pick. I greatly enjoyed both books. To Faulkner again, though, Light in August is my favorite, not Sound and Fury; with Roth, The Ghost Writer, not Operation Shylock. I’m a sucker for being moved while reading, but not when I feel the author’s finger prodding me in the back.
Advancing:
The Accidental
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
WARNER: With Foer going down for the second time, joining zombie Zadie Smith in the smoldering pile of undead corpses, we’ve now demonstrated the absolute futility of the “do over.” If you examine the great “d-o’s” in history, you’ll see that very rarely do they bring about a different outcome.
1. Greenbriar School recess kickball game, fall 1977
This was a year-long game that came down to a final at-bat for yours truly in the 167th inning with the score 345-344 and two men (actually girls, Susie Hawkins and Missy Florio) on base. As I prepared to drive the ball over the heads of the outfielders, I so psyched myself out that I wound up barely clipping the ball, resulting in a weak pop-up to the first baseman. I immediately shouted “d-o, d-o” saying that my shoe was untied, which it was, because I didn’t know how to tie my shoes yet.
Finally granted my “d-o” after much wailing and teeth gnashing, I managed to whiff entirely. And fall down. And break my coccyx.
2. The Chicago Cubs “Bartman” Playoff incident
People forget that after Steve Bartman interfered with Moises Alou as he tried to catch a ball in foul territory, Alou successfully secured a “d-o” by throwing his mitt to the ground and having a fit worthy of a third-grader at a recess kickball game. Of course, the Cubs lost anyway, because they are losers.
Except for this year. This year they’re going to win!
3. Iraq War
Obviously a “d-o” of Vietnam. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Peter Pace recently declared that things are going “very very well.” He is obviously on drugs because things are going beyond horribly. Ironically, according to a recent article by Seymour Hersh, the Bush administration is now targeting Iran in a “d-o” for Iraq.
By golly they’re going to get regime change right or cause a holy war trying!
As a fan of basketball from the era when the shorts were more nut-huggers than pajamas, you’re going to cite the infamous 1972 Olympic gold medal game between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., where a do-over ultimately resulted in a Soviet win. What you’re forgetting is that that situation was actually a “d-o, d-o.” In some cases, the second do-over will end in a different result.
What this means is that maybe with another round, Zadie Smith and JSF might find their way into the finals and that the Bush administration may just be able to nuke Iran into a stable democracy.
GUILFOILE: I worked at an ad agency for 11 years, and every time the business section reported on a longtime agency being fired by a client, the writer would say the firm had been “unceremoniously dumped.” I heard the phrase in that context again on NPR the other day and I’d like to point out to those thinking about employing this cliché in the future that the alternative, which presumably would involve being dumped as part of some public ceremony, would be far, far worse.
Rosecrans, on the other hand, lets you down easy. He’s probably friends with all his ex-girlfriends. When asked, telemarketers gladly put him on their “do not call” list. Wendy’s employees agree not to put cheese on his hamburger without having to be physically restrained.
We have a fascinating match for the final round. First we have Home Land, which seems to be one of those love-it-or-hate-it books, and I don’t think many would have given it odds of making it this far. And now The Accidental, which came in with plenty of hype and acclaim and award nominations, but it was advanced reluctantly in the second round by Maud, as the result of a bizarre, forcibly compelled coin flip by Dale Peck, and today in an enthusiastic nail-biter by Rosecrans.
Honestly I can’t say I have any bead on which way this thing is leaning.