'Extremely loud and incredibly close'

September 11, 2001 is a difficult subject for novelists. Writers dealing with it must be careful not to manipulate their readers with cheap sentimentality, and the relatively short passage of time means that wounds are still raw for many readers. Despite these challenges, recent novels continue to draw on the terrorist attacks for subject material.

The second novel from Jonathan Safran Foer '99, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," is the latest on this growing list, which already includes Ian McEwan's "Saturday," Frédéric Beigbeder's "Windows on the World" and V.S. Naipaul's "Magic Seeds." Unfortunately, like these other novels — with the possible exception of "Magic Seeds" — Foer's book is seriously flawed. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" buckles under the weight of its own clichés, and the ingenuity of the mind that brought us the acclaimed "Everything Is Illuminated" can do nothing to save it.

The book follows its hero, the precocious nine-year-old Oskar Schell, through the five boroughs of New York on a mission to find a lock. This lock matches a key that Oskar found among the possessions of his father, who died in the World Trade Center. The only clue the boy has is the word "Black" written in red ink on the envelope that contained the key. Oskar makes it his goal to question everyone in New York City whose last name is Black, and gets all the way from Aaron Black to Peter Black before he receives a call that ends his search. Along the way, he meets various odd characters: a 103 year-old man who keeps a one-word biography of anyone he thinks is important; a woman who never leaves the Empire State Building; a couple that has turned their home into a museum celebrating their love for each other. Oskar ultimately arrives at a cemetery, accompanied by the mute renter of his grandmother's spare room, preparing to exhume his father's coffin.

The plot is admittedly clever, and Oskar's journey is mildly reminiscent of the Little Prince's intergalactic travels on his way to Earth. Unlike "The Little Prince," however, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is grounded in present-day New York, completely devoid of any fantastic or magical elements and, at least in theory, aimed at grownup readers. Oskar's adventures lack the Little Prince's profundity, and any life lessons we might glean from them are lost in the weirdness of having to suspend our disbelief that a nine-year-old could undertake such an odyssey.

It seems like Foer wants to use his child protagonist to squeeze every drop of sympathy from readers, as if we wouldn't feel sorry enough for an adult who lost a loved one on September 11. Oskar is the type of nerdy smartass we'd be callous not to identify with: of course his classmates bully him; of course he sends letters to Stephen Hawking; of course he speaks fluent French and says that making his mother happy is "one of my raisons d'être." We get the picture that we're supposed to like Oskar, and this book would be a lot less painful to read if Foer would stop beating us over the head with that.

For some reason, Foer decorates his book with funny pictures and garish gimmicks. There are pictures of tennis players, mating turtles and the backs of people's heads, and one chapter is marked up by the red ink of a correction pen. While most of this bears at least some relevance to the plot, the devices are ultimately unnecessary. Nevertheless, this visual kerfuffle is a welcome distraction from the banality that surrounds it, and we must wonder if this wasn't Foer's purpose in including it.

The last few pages of "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" are devoted to photographs of a man plummeting from the World Trade Center, taken at different moments during his fall. The images are arranged in reverse order to form a sort of flipbook — flip would definitely be an apt word — in which the man appears to be floating up. I won't concern myself with how tasteless this is, but will only mention that the flipbook is part of a rewind sequence that might as well be directly lifted from Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five." When his grandmother tells Oskar about her personal history, she describes her childhood during World War II in Dresden and how she fantasized that "all of the collapsed ceilings reformed above us. The fire went back into the bombs, which rose up and into the bellies of the planes whose propellers turned backwards."

Vonnegut wrote a similar passage — more than thirty years ago — in which the hero of his book watches a war movie in reverse, the fires of a burning city collapsing into neat packages that get sucked up into airplanes which then get disassembled by women in factories. Both plot points involve Dresden. It's a shame that the ingenious creator of the hilarious Alex in "Everything Is Illuminated" must resort to cribbing Vonnegut, but I guess it's not the only feature of this book that has been dealt with elsewhere.

It has become lately quite fashionable to berate Foer, and I feel pretty pretentious for writing such harsh words about his book in his alma mater's daily paper. "Everything Is Illuminated," however, demonstrated Foer's immense talent, and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" does not measure up to this first novel. We cannot laugh at Oskar like we can at Alex and this makes the book, which already deals with a difficult subject, very hard to get through. But Foer's career will likely survive this failure, and despite its myriad problems, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" has found a place on The New York Times' bestseller list. So, I don't feel too guilty.