Fiction: A small boy struggles with the sudden death of a father who never came home. It's a sad story and tragically, not all that unusual. Except that the child, Oskar Schell, is a nine year old with an encyclopaedic brain, bloated vocabulary and a vivid imagination.
He is also devoted to facts and preoccupied by his powerful love for his dead father. The loss has been made worse by the absence of a body. Oskar's father was a victim of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and his coffin was empty.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close comes three years after the young New York writer Jonathan Safran Foer's irresponsibly overrated debut, Everything is Illuminated, a multilayered extravaganza of a book hailed by leading New York literati as the New York Jewish/Eastern European answer to whatever happened to Latin American Magic Realism.
Recent history provides Safran Foer with the bones of his new novel. More of it comes from the past, and other besieged cities, such as Dresden and Hiroshima. It is a busy novel; chaotic, laboured and repetitive. The prose is overly conversational with only snatches of fleeting eloquence.
If this is the long-awaited fictionalised acknowledgement of the day New York, and the US, finally experienced definitive violation on home territory, the book does not live up to the task.
Yet, young Oskar, for all his forensic detail and obvious precocity, not forgetting his constant use of his pet adverbs, "extremely" and "incredibly", proves a likeable, if not an overly convincing, child narrator - Huck Finn he's not, although he has sufficient irony to report "I'm very idealistic, but I knew I couldn't walk that far, so I took a cab" and runs up a bill of $76.50.
Safran Foer is trying hard, too hard, and it shows.
Home is a vast apartment in Manhattan, empty nowadays without Dad and no closer to being filled by the presence of Mom's new friend Ron. Mom has a career and Oskar spends much of his time in the company of his own schemes. He's an inventor with a flair for intrigue, but, above all, clever, sad, lonely Oskar continues alone to mourn his father. The boy speaks, relentlessly. He exists in a zone somewhere between knowing childhood and the darker adult world.
From page one, the narrative displays its shaky foundations. Oskar is clever, perhaps too clever, and aside from the loss of his father, his biggest problem could be that he not only knows he's clever, he thinks he's funny. "Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I'd train it to say, 'Wasn't me!' every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously my anus would say, 'Ce n'étais pas moi!"
Not destined to rank among the most riveting of opening paragraphs , it is at this point that the reader may suspect that this novel requires more commitment than it deserves and abandon ship.
Oskar's little jokes don't amount to much but his memory of his father perusing the pages of the New York Times circling misprints and other errors, when not playing games and reading stories to his son, are nicely handled. So too is his guilt; Oskar is haunted by not having answered his father's final phone message. His father, Thomas Schell, seems a caring parent, the mother is more of a token presence. The boy engages in many fantasies but he also has his fear. "I woke once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster's paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares."
Early in the novel, the author seems to be saying, "hey, this is a serious novel concerned with big issues, death, memory and the legacy of war, but I'm very young and as funny as hell".
Just when it seems, very quickly, that this new book could be going nowhere at all, Oskar who is given to snooping and lying, is investigating his late father's effects and notices a blue vase. It slips from his hands, breaks and reveals a key and a name. Oskar has a quest; the discovery of exactly what this key opens. His search, aided by a clue, the name Black, brings him to various addresses scattered through the five boroughs of New York. New characters mean new stories. Oskar learns that all lives are made up of stories.
Although there is the impression that Safran Foer has tried hard to keep Paul Auster at some distance, there is no denying his influence on this novel. To use Oskar's own favourite words it is "extremely" and "incredibly" obvious how closely Auster stalks the narrative.
The characters have their moments in which to outline their respective histories. One of them is an ancient, former war correspondent of 103 years of age.
Sharing some of the narrative with Oskar is his grandmother, the dead man's mother, who knows all about abandonment, having been deserted by her husband. Her reminiscences account for some of the text.
The connections abound, as does the use of the now standard arsenal of gimmicks including blank pages, lists, rogue type face, cryptic messages, red ink, blanked out text, pages of numbers and photographs. It's a bit of a free for all, somehow missing out on establishing any sense of a city and a nation in post-attack trauma. Equally, Oskar's vulnerability and eccentric intelligence, including his correspondence with Stephen Hawking, are left battling for control of a performance that is buoyed with a determined ambition to achieve something profound.
Ultimately, the impression created is rather like a movie in which the credits began running up the screen halfway through the action - and no one really cares.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close By Jonathan Safran Foer Hamish Hamilton, 326pp. £14.99
