Oskar Schell, the hero and chief narrator of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is an amateur inventor, a Shakespearean actor, an astrophysicist, a jewelry designer, a tamborine player, a pacifist and a Francophile. He is also nine years old. Oskar’s journey begins when he finds a mysterious key labeled “Black” belonging to his father, who was killed in the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11. Oskar’s adulation for his late father combined with his innocent logic spurrs him to discover the background of the key by tracking down each person named Black in the New York City telephone book–all 262 of them. The result is a hilarious, touching, and epic search throughout all five boroughs of New York from Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem, with a patchwork assortment of characters, from a retired journalist who keeps a card catalogue of everyone he meets, to a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building.

Through the prism of Oskar’s precocious verbosity, Foer takes on the catastrophe and upheaval of recent American history. He puts it partially in context by addressing the broader scope of political trauma, interweaving the stories of Oskar’s grandparents, whose lives and homes were devastated in the firebombing of Dresden during WWII, and including an at once amusing and apalling sequence in which Oskar discusses the Hiroshima bombing for show-and-tell. In all of these respects, Foer follows up his brilliant and bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, filling the book with the kind of lingustic fireworks of distincitive voices that have distinguished him as an author. He also gilds the text with photographs, colored highlights, text overwritten to the point of illegibility, and a flip book. Above all, Foer demonstrates that contemporary malaise will not induce him to ignore the themes that have shaped human life as long as it has existed; his meditation on life and loss does not shy from addressing truth and beauty, death and love.

Read a review by John Updike here; read the New York Times review here.