books

Oskar Schell is nine years old, fiercely intelligent, anxious, grieving, and almost unbearably alive on the page. His father died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, and a little over a year later Oskar finds a key in an envelope marked "Black" tucked inside a vase in his father's closet. Convinced it is the last instalment in the elaborate scavenger hunts his father used to design for him, he sets out across the five boroughs to visit everyone in New York with the surname Black, hoping the lock the key fits will return some piece of the man he lost. It is a premise that could have collapsed into whimsy, and the remarkable thing is how often it does not.

The novel's great achievement is Oskar's voice. He invents impossible machines, wears only white, carries a tambourine to soothe his nerves, and narrates his own sorrow with a precision that is both funny and devastating. The interior life Foer builds for him is so specific and so consistent that he becomes one of those rare child narrators who feels genuinely observed rather than performed. The supporting cast does not disappoint either, from the 103-year-old neighbour Mr. Black to the strangers Oskar encounters on his quest, each of whom carries some private weight that mirrors his own.

Foer does not tell the story straight. The book moves on a deliberately broken, nonlinear path, braiding Oskar's narration with letters from his grandparents that reach back to the firebombing of Dresden, so that one historical catastrophe rhymes against another. He also reaches well beyond words, filling pages with photographs, handwriting that crowds in on itself until it becomes an unreadable black block, blank spreads, and even strings of numbers. These are not gimmicks bolted on for novelty. At their best the visual experiments do real emotional work, conveying the desperation to communicate grief when language itself starts to fail, and they push at the question of what a novel can be and contain. Not every device earns its place, and readers with no patience for postmodern flourishes will find some of them precious, but the ambition is honest and frequently moving.

The objection that has trailed this book since publication is sentimentality, and it deserves to be met head on rather than waved away. The novel arrived only four years after the attacks, and that nearness left it open to the charge that it was milking a wound the culture had not finished dressing. There are passages that tug at the tear ducts with a self-consciousness that borders on manipulation, and the late, near-relentless accumulation of epiphanies can feel engineered. The most notorious example, an image of a body falling from the tower that Oskar wishes were his father, is the kind of moment that divides a room: unforgivable to some, the precise emotional truth of a child's helplessness to others. It is fair to say that Foer's evident pleasure in his own cleverness occasionally gets between the reader and the meaning, and there are stretches where the architecture shows.

And yet the sentimentality is not the same thing as failure. The book is unembarrassed about wanting you to feel, and it is worth asking whether the suspicion of "easy" tears says more about a certain critical reflex than about the work itself. Plenty of careful, sceptical readers have found themselves crying anyway and refused to apologise for it, and that response is not naïve. Foer is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk looking foolish in pursuit of the largest subjects, love, loss, the impossibility of saying what we mean, and that willingness is precisely what makes him polarising. The same gestures that strike one reader as unearned strike another as the bravest thing in the book.

A few weaknesses are harder to defend. Oskar's mother is curiously absent for most of the quest, letting a nine-year-old roam the city alone in a way that strains belief even allowing for her own grief, and the grandfather's strand, with its abandonment and its silence, can read as colder and more opaque than affecting. The framing of Oskar as implicitly neurodivergent is handled with sympathy but never quite named or examined.

What lingers, once the structural debates fade, is the feeling. This is finally a love letter to a grieving city and to the people who keep reaching for each other in the dark. It is messy, overreaching, occasionally insufferable and frequently beautiful, sometimes within the same chapter. Read it for Oskar, who is one of the most fully imagined children in recent fiction, and brace yourself for the fact that it will probably make you cry, whether or not you decide you approve of how.