Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer Hamish Hamilton, 326pp, £14.99 ISBN 024114213X

Novels tend to be a game for the middle-aged: it is mostly poets who can get away with dying young. When Jonathan Safran Foer wrote the much-praised Everything Is Illuminated, he was 21 years old - not the age at which you would expect an insight into the Holocaust. Yet that book works for two reasons: it isn't really about the Holocaust, and it's more an exercise in poetry than prose. Foer has a wonderful ear, and the central conceit of his Ukrainian narrator is the young man's abuse of the thesaurus, which allows Foer to startle us into taking a fresh look at the ordinary (one of the things poetry does particularly well).

Everything Is Illuminated understandably falls short of bringing home to us the horror of the Shoah, though it uses that horror to its advantage. Horror baulks at explanations, and the novel is less about the difficulty of explaining than the difficulty of acknowledging: a subject better suited to the understanding of a young man born more than 30 years after the Second World War.

Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, also takes as its starting point the horrors of history, though this time he is writing closer to home. The novel is told from the per- spective of Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy whose father died in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. A child of smackable precocity, Oskar has a rest- less imagination and wants to explain a world he is not yet old enough to understand. When he discovers a key inside an envelope labelled Black, hidden in a vase inside his father's dressing room, he determines to root out the mystery. He trawls New York City looking for the owner of the key, hoping the journey will bring him closer to his father.

Oskar, like a mini-Herzog, intersperses his narrative with the letters his frustrated curiosity spurs him to write to various public figures including Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall. Foer experiments with other voices, too, and rummages once more through the closets of grandparents. There is a back story involving Oskar's grandmother, her escape from the bombing of Dresden, the ruin of her marriage, the return of her husband. These more or less come together just as Oskar improbably discovers the history of the key and learns to cope with his grief.

Oskar's narration has moments of genuine charm - he "invents", among other things, an elevator in which the building moves up and down rather than the lift, allowing for obvious emergency measures - but this time Foer's adopted naivety highlights rather than obscures the holes in his storytelling. Quite apart from the letter-writing gimmick, the influence of Saul Bellow seems strong - not just in Foer's emphasis on the idiosyncrasies of narrative "voice", but also in his willingness to tackle large themes. The trouble is, his writing possesses neither of the virtues that Bellow's work marries so spectacularly: a vivid grasp of the passage of ordinary life, and a wide knowledge of cultural and intellectual history. Novels tend to be a game for the middle-aged because what holds them together are the complicated relations between characters, situations and events. Foer has little insight into these (or, in his defence, little interest in them), and instead glues his narrative together with obsessive whimsy.

Oskar discovers a city full of various mournings: a woman who lives per-manently in the Empire State Building because her salesman husband, before he died, used to wear a flashlight that allow-ed her to follow his working day through Manhattan; a couple who have built two museums in their home, each to the life of the other; a widower who hammers a nail into his bed every day to remind him of his wife's death.

The back story also articulates an older, more settled sense of loss. Oskar's grand-father, it seems, has used up his ability to speak. To compensate, he has tattooed the words "yes" and "no" on his left and right palms. He fills notebooks with sentiments he might want to utter, and refers to a page of these whenever the language of his hands proves insufficient. Page after page of the novel is occupied by single lines, such as "What are you doing here?" or "My name is Thomas". Keats has vividly described the put-upon feeling of a reader expected to listen to a lecture: "We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us - and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket." Prose that forces upon a reader heavy symbolic sympathies has a similar effect.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is, in fact, relentlessly gimmicky. There are various photographs, including a number of doorknobs, unevenly interspersed. At one point, the grandfather's narrative grows so dense with his "endless" desire to communicate that the print runs over itself illegibly. But Foer hasn't committed to the full magic of his realism, and still makes little gestures towards plausibility that leave him in the nowhere-land between the two styles. One of the great advantages of realism is that it tends towards a natural narrative drive, and while Oskar's story, to be fair, has this in its favour, the back story of the grandparents has none at all. To compensate, Foer is forced to adopt a succession of styles. It is like watching someone attempt to fly, as he takes on with repeated brevity various approximate postures before coming to earth again. Even his wonderful ear deserts him under these constraints, and much of the prose is worse than ordinary.

At its heart, the novel has little to offer but the obvious and sentimental. The mantra it invokes is "To mourn try to live". Yet the book, however innocently, may be complicit in worse feelings, too: the unmeasured hysteria of the American response to the attacks on its native soil. A story that brings together the bombing of Dresden and the collapse of the World Trade Center should provide a sense of the relative scale of these disasters. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close does not even attempt it. Obviously, tragedy in its private reach isn't susceptible to comparison, and one cannot blame a nine-year-old boy for seeing, in the loss of his father, the death of the world he knew. But one can hold a country accountable for its sense of proportion. And a writer who takes as his subject the defining moment of contemporary American history probably should.

Benjamin Markovits's second novel, Either Side of Winter, is published by Faber & Faber in August

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