My parents visited me in the fall, and when I hopped into the backseat of their rental car for a glorious free dinner, my stepmom immediately handed me a shiny, hardcover book. "This is fantastic," she said. "Read it, you'll love it. But you have to make sure to give that one back, because it's a first edition."

Whenever my stepmom recommends a book, my ears perk up. And Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was hardly a disappointment.

The main narrator in Foer's book is Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy who very rarely talks like a nine-year-old boy, who is vegan and fluent in French and who writes to Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall, who flirts with adult women and spends his free time inventing poetic, beautiful contraptions like "mood skin" and upside-down skyscrapers. In short, he should be completely unbelievable as a character - or at the very least, damn annoying, which was a fear I admit to having during the first paragraph - and yet . . . he's not. Oskar is definitely nine years old. And though his traits may not be believable in the more scientific sense of the word, Foer creates a character that his audience desperately wants to exist, and so he can. He is believable because of his necessity to us.

Oskar's father dies in the 9/11 attacks, and the book follows him searching all of New York City for clues about his father's life. This general narrative is often interrupted with the voice of his grandmother and mute grandfather explaining their lives to their grandson in letters. In retrospect, these letters may also seem to call for that "willing suspension of disbelief," as they discuss their youth with such startling honesty that you later wonder "who can even write that down on paper, much less address it to a nine-year-old relative?" But these interruptions have a subconscious feeling to them; like letters written not on paper, but in one's head - apologies for betrayals, confessions of weaknesses, unexpected intimacy with strangers. And these interruptions are themselves interrupted: by blank pages, photographs, and editorial red pen.

It's like . . . a scrapbook. No, it's like . . . an interactive artwork. No. It's like . . . a diary. No.

It's like being in someone's head? Maybe? Many heads?

It's unlike any book I've ever read.

And so Oskar sets about solving the mystery left by his dead father, his grandparents try to reach conclusions about their lives and each other, and meanwhile all of the characters Oskar meets along the way seem to be searching for something: simultaneously closed off and vulnerable, waiting for the answer to arrive.

I remember this book as being one of the most beautiful I've ever read, and so it surprised me when I tried to go back and pull that amazing quote: the one that would make everyone go "OH! Hey yeah, I should read that." and I couldn't. But then, I've noticed that lately I'm attracted to books not for their language or metaphorical niceities, but for the structure of the story and its tangents. In contrast to combing books for the perfect sentence, the twelve-word bit of wisdom that summed up all of humanity, revealing "situations" hold more interest. Foer is great at these perfectly constructed moments:

I asked him did he really love New York or was he just wearing the shirt. He smiled, like he was nervous. I could tell he didn't understand, which made me feel guilty for speaking English, for some reason. I pointed at his shirt. "Do? You? Really? Love? New York?" He said, "New York?" I said, "Your. Shirt." He looked at his shirt. I pointed at the N and said "New," and the Y and said "York." He looked confused, or embarrassed, or surprised, or maybe even mad. I couldn't tell what he was feeling, because I couldn't speak the language of his feelings. "I not know was New York. In Chinese, ny mean 'you.' Thought was 'I love you." It was then that I noticed the "I [heart] NY" flag over the door, and the "I [heart] NY" dishtowels, and the "I [heart] NY" lunchbox on the kitchen table. I asked him, "Well, then why do you love everybody so much?"

It's been a while since I finished this book, and I've since read Everything is Illuminated, which everyone has completely wet themselves over. There was a review in Dig that criticized Foer's second book as something not really worth fighting over: Everything is Illuminated was so brilliant, he said, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close wasn't any kind of extreme at all. It was just pretty good, and not what you'd expect as a follow-up. There was no controversy about it.

I enjoyed Foer's debut and all, but this guy has got to be kidding. Read this, and let's talk.

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