Kinderkampf.

Jonathan Safran Foer Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Houghton Mifflin, 326 pages, $24.95

The plot of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close hinges on a mysterious key. Fitting: it's a roman a clef in several ways. Look at Oskar Schell, age nine, the book's precocious, insufferable Montessori casualty of a narrator. Wordsworth wrote that the child is father to the man, but in this case, "father" doesn't cut it: the child is indistinguishable from the man. Harry Siegel, who wrote a vicious review of Incredibly Close for the New York Press, noted that Oskar "writes letters to Stephen Hawking and other luminaries" and that Foer "wrote letters to Susan Sontag when he was nine." That's not all: upon finishing his first novel, Foer wrote to Sontag, John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, John Updike, and other "luminaries" to request "the next sheet of paper that he or she would have written on."

Blank page: emptiness, potential, magic. Heavy. Oates is very fond of Foer; a New York Press list of the "50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers" japed that she invented him in a Princeton laboratory. Updike penned an avuncular review of Incredibly Close for The New Yorker. Wallace, the postmodern godfather of droll, is present in spirit on every page of Foer's new book. (Trace the lineage: Wallace gave us A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again; his disciple Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; now Foer drops Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and chapter headings like "A Simple Solution to an Impossible Problem." If brevity is the soul of wit, these guys have all the wit of a telephone directory.) The confidence man Foer appealed to their vanity, and they fell hard. Yet the biggest loser here is Foer himself.

Foer's homunculus, Oskar, is likeable only to Foer and his ilk. Oskar pretends to childlike innocence, but children learn at an early age how to manipulate, and this kid is all cocktail-party-pleasing, scratch-behind-my-ears calculation. Had we a real Oskar, we'd shut him up, Kaspar Hanser-style, in some damp and cobwebbed oubliette--that is, if we couldn't just send him the way of Little Nell.

Oh, but Oskar's father died in the World Trade Center. This is a 9/11 book, and that's a neon sign: Do be KIND, this is IMPORTANT. The McGuffin, the mysterious key, is found by Oskar among his father's belongings. He wonders what lock it fits, i.e., Where are my existential answers? The key is in an envelope marked Black, so Oskar's quest is to visit--in the real world, we'd say harass--everyone in New York City named Black. Here he is with one Abby Black:

"Since you're an epidemiologist," I said, "did you know that seventy percent of household dust is actually composed of human epidermal matter?" "No," she said, "I didn't." "I'm an amateur epidemiologist." "There aren't many of those." "Yeah. And I conducted a pretty fascinating experiment once where I told [the maid] Feliz to save all the dust from our apartment for a year in a garbage bag for me. Then I weighed it.... That doesn't actually prove anything, but it's weird."

Uh oh--somebody's been cribbing from himself! Foer's essay about blank pages, entitled (I kid you not) "emptiness: the joy and terror of the blank page, empty and infinite, source of anxiety and inspiration for all writers, including this one," says: "I've read that 90 percent of household dust is actually composed of human epidermal matter. So I like to think of the page as holding the face that once looked over it..."

Do you, really? I guarantee that Foer's lone similarity to less pretentious writers is that he used a computer to write Incredibly Close. He deploys plenty of typographical gimmickry that only a modern word processor could make possible--for instance, a chapter in which the kerning gradually becomes so tight that the text is illegible. But I doubt the monitor on his blueberry iMac accrued much epidermal matter in the half hour it apparently took him to spit out this nonsense. And if it did, so what? The words are the words, regardless of the care or (highly dubious) pain that went into them. An honest reader could care less about process.

Everyone cringed when he learned that Foer's sophomore effort was to be a 9/11 novel. Foer countered by asking, "Why do people wonder what's 'OK' to make art about, as if creating art out of tragedy weren't an inherently good thing? ... Too many people hate art." Nothing is inherently good, and people, often despite themselves, hate bad art, not art qua art. It's all in the execution. Foer, setting out to examine and memorialize tragedy, was faced with a choice: will I be an adult, or will I retreat into childish fantasy? He made the wrong choice.

That's this roman's real clef--not the answer to "Who is Foer?" but to "Why can't his generation answer--or even ask--the questions that ought to matter to it?"

A young author who debuts in August has written a book as a letter to Osama bin Laden, along the lines of "I know you're upset with the West, but if you could just understand how much I loved my husband and son, you'd back off." Not likely. A Dave Eggers clone, some registered member of the Long Title Club, wrote a piece for Eggers's McSweeney's magazine called "Translated Thoughts and Questions that are Running Through a North Korean Refugee's Mind When He is Awarded Political Asylum in the United States, Settles Down, Turns on the Television, and the First Thing He Sees is a Fancy Feast Cat Food Commercial":

   This commercial brings back memories of a
   difficult childhood in Pyongyang, when my
   pet cat, Mr. Finicky Timbers, ran away and
   tried to cross the demilitarized zone, unsuccessfully,
   making it through the razor wire but
   then ... the land mine.

      And the international community is worried
   about North Korea's development of
   weapons of mass destruction?

      In America, cats eat choice cuts of chicken
   out of handcrafted Tiffany goblets.

Yawn. It's heartbreaking folly, a staggering failure of imagination--the same mentality that birthed Foer's book, which is stuffed to the gills with embarrassing bromides about pacifism and the futility of war. Oskar's business card, one of the book's many groan-making illustrations, notes that he is a Francophile and pacifist, among other things that would make you send your kid straight to football camp.

The story of Oskar's quest is intercut with the story of his grandfather's traumatic survival of Dresden's firebombing. (He elects not to speak, but writes frantically on notecards.) The pitiable Grandpa goes to America, marries, and impregnates his wife; then he leaves her, because he doesn't know how to live, or love, or something. Later, he comes back. He spies on his wife, and his grandson Oskar. Eventually he and Oskar, who doesn't know his elderly friend's true identity, dig up Oskar's dad's (empty) grave and stuff it with letters Grandpa has written to his now-dead son. For a man dumbstruck, Grandpa is an incredibly prolific writer.

Foer, like the author of the North Korea piece, fails to understand tragedy--it wasn't invented or perfected on 9/11, and those who have experienced it, say, over a span of decades do not see it as an occasion for cute workshop projects or snarky media-culture commentary. And they do not, as so many of our writers have done, take comfort in wishes and daydreams. Foer's book, you may have read, concludes with a flipbook in which a man who has jumped from the Trade Center actually rises toward the sky.

   When I flipped through them, it looked like
   the man was floating up through the sky.

      And if I'd had more pictures, he would've
   flown through a window, back into the building,
   and the smoke would've poured into a
   hole that the plane was about to come out
   of....

      We would have been safe.

Fin. While you're at it, imagine there's no countries. But it did happen, and Foer's book does nothing to address why or why not. It only pushes us deeper into the sheltering bosom of self-pity and, inevitably, cowardice. For Foer himself, one suspects, it harkens back to his childhood, when he was a special little Sontag-idolizing wunderkind and not one of a thousand MFA brats grasping after another fix of senseless praise. It rather gives up the game when, at one point, Oskar scolds someone for making him feel "unspecial."

Gerald Seymour, a British author of spy novels and "thrillers," wrote a book, The Unknown Soldier, about an al Qaeda terrorist--not sympathetic or relativistic, but accurate, as he guessed it--but don't expect it to receive the notice Incredibly Close has. It deals with the problems (to put it lightly) of terrorism and evil, but doesn't stir any of Foer's shallow pools of aphoristic wisdom; it doesn't hide behind a child. We can cock our ears to the mouths of babes, or we can, like Saint Paul, become men and put away childish things. The former may be pleasant--it might even sell--but our survival depends upon the latter. If Foer is one of the unacknowledged legislators of our age, its time to whip out the veto.