Poignant character created in Foer’s ‘Extremely Loud’

Is it still too soon for fiction to confront the trauma of Sept. 11, 2001? That’s what Jonathan Safran Foer’s much-anticipated new novel attempts to do, and the results are mixed.

In the three and a half years since the destruction of the World Trade Center, novelists have mostly avoided looking directly at the event. It lingers in the background of some novels, such as Ian McEwan’s brilliant “Saturday,” where allusions to the terrorist attack add to an aura of perpetual uncertainty.

But the attack itself has such an emotional charge that to depict it, or the people most directly affected by it, threatens to overload a novel’s circuits.

Foer is willing to take the risk: He centers his novel on a 9-year-old boy whose father died in the towers. Sent home from school early that day, Oskar Schell arrived in time to hear a series of messages on the answering machine from his father, who was trapped in the building.

Oskar is a precocious child, a loner with an idiosyncratic view of the world, and he’s a mess of tics and phobias – not all of which stem from his father’s terrible death, but which were certainly exacerbated by it.

But Oskar also has a streak of the intrepid, and when he discovers among his father’s belongings a key in an envelope labeled “Black,” he sets out on an oddball quest: to find the lock that the key opens.

So he starts tracking down everyone named Black in New York City, which takes him far afield from his flat in Manhattan – despite his fear of subways, bridges and anything that might be subject to terrorist attack.

This is not a conventionally realistic novel. Elements of the fantastic abound in Oskar’s odyssey, as they do in the novel’s other major narrative thread – the gradually unfolding story of Oskar’s grandparents, who survived another hideous event: the firebombing of Dresden. Foer struggles to steer his story around the pitfalls of sensationalism, sentimentality and blatant symbolism, but the strain is too often evident.

“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” also is larded with visual tricks: not only photographs, including the disturbingly repeated image of a body in free fall from the World Trade Center, but also typographical gimmicks. There are pages with only a single line of text, and one section ends with the space between the lines gradually diminishing, so that the text becomes increasingly unreadable until the final page is nearly a solid black. These old-hat modernist stunts are introduced at moments of emotional intensity in the novel, but they only blunt the impact.

Still, Oskar is a tremendously moving creation, and the skill with which Foer brings him to life is exceptional.

Foer made a smashing debut in 2002, at the age of 25, with the novel “Everything Is Illuminated,” a commercial and critical success that’s being made into a movie starring Elijah Wood.

He says that he wrote 39 drafts of “Extremely Loud,” a total of 2,500 pages, and that Oskar was not even a character in the first draft. Clearly, this is an author of prodigious imagination. If he learns to discipline that imagination, he’ll be an unstoppable literary force.