I must declare myself: I loved Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This may not send teacups clattering to the nations' kitchen floors but in the literary world it feels like a stance worthy of a Bateman cartoon.
I am not completely alone. The energetic, bold, funny and moving book, whose main character is a precocious nine-year-old, Oskar, whose father was killed in the twin towers, has a quote from Salman Rushdie on the cover: "Perhaps the highest praise I can give is to say it completely earns the right to take on the World Trade atrocity." And a starry-eyed Baltimore Sun wrote "It's a miracle, a daybreak, a man on the moon so impeccably imagined, so courageously executed, so everlastingly moving."
On the whole, though, Safran Foer's hugely anticipated second novel has had a roasting. The Observer wrote, apropos of Rushdie's comment: "Most of the time, I felt the opposite." The inclusion of a "flip-book" of photos of a person falling from the towers but reversed, so they appear to be flying upwards, has come in for special criticism. "If I were the relative of the victim, I would possibly want to beat him up," wrote Scotland on Sunday.
Others have a problem with Safran Foer's style. Oskar has a very fertile imagination and we are given full access to his flights of fancy. There are many typographical tricks, such as pages left blank, annotated, or printed with words so squashed they are impossible to read. "Only readers with a very high tolerance for massive doses of whimsy stand a chance of making it through to the end," thought The Telegraph. Others found it cloying and mawkish. "Sure, the climatic scene is genuinely moving: I shed a few tears," sniffed one reviewer. "But what does that prove? I cried at Bambi, too."
Safran Foer, who has just flown into London from his home in New York, is sanguine. "It's nice when a connection is made and you feel someone has read the book as you want them to read it, but it is an extraordinary thing when that happens and I don't worry that much when it doesn't."
He also suggests some reviewers' motives may not be entirely pure. At only 28, Safran Foer (pronounced "Four") is that rare thing: a writer who has won literary prizes and also makes pots of money. "A lot of the time, it is writers writing about the things they want," he says. "If they can't have it, they destroy it. My meanest reviews in America were from novelists who don't have audiences. I would never say that to them but it's an indisputable fact."
Money never fails to be mentioned in connection with him; he was paid $500,000 for his first novel, 2002's Everything Is Illuminated, and $1m for this one. He points out that these advances are for maybe four years' work, before tax and agent fees. "If you were just someone who worked in a company, you would make more money. It is really a shame it is used against you, or talked about at the expense of talking about your book."
To add to the ire, he has recently married Nicole Krauss, who is perhaps his female equivalent in the US. Her much-hyped second novel, The History of Love, is currently receiving rave reviews (Safran Foer denies any competitiveness: "It's not something we think about. Her success is my success. My success is her success.") Both have had their film rights snapped up (Everything Is Illuminated, directed by Liev Schrieber, is released in September). A magazine has named Safran Foer as one of the 50 most hated people in New York two years running.
He is, in fact, not in the least loathsome; he is polite, considered, softly spoken and rather shy. One senses he finds interviews uncomfortable but he is articulate in defence of his work.
He included the flip photos because "I think it really gets to a truth about the day. My experience, and the experience of so many people I know, is wishing that it could be undone. Also, 9/11 is the most visually documented event in human history; those images are how people remember it. What is interesting is that the people I have talked to who have had direct relationships with the event not only have no problem with it but it has touched them."
What about the sentimentality? "I think things being ugly and emotional is a real combination," he says, gracefully correcting the word. "I don't see why anyone would resist emotion in this case. If there was ever something that was emotional, this was it. I know so many people who called family members and said 'I love you' for the first time in years."
In a dual narrative, he gives us the story of Oskar's grandfather, who survived the bombing of Dresden. This was, he says, because "in America, September 11 was taken out of historical context and global context, as if it were the worst thing that had ever happened. Not to say that Dresden had anything to do with it but when people try to justify Dresden they say yes, it was a horrible thing, but it was commensurate with these evils that the Germans were doing. A lot of people thought that way about September 11. How can we say that one is right and one is wrong? Both are wrong, and putting them near each other is a reminder that these things depend on perspective. And that was something that was really missing in the way the Bush administration was talking about 9/11. It was all about absolutes. Absolute good, absolute evil."
Everything Is Illuminated also tackled a huge, highly sensitive subject; the Holocaust. "Before I wrote my books, I had all sorts of ideas about myself that were then corrected when I read them," he says. "I thought I wasn't interested in Jewish things, or family history, or September 11. But I was wrong."
He has also realised that both books also have a connection with something that happened when he was nine years old. At summer camp, a make-shift chemistry lab exploded; his best friend was permanently disfigured. Safran Foer was physically unharmed but had a nervous breakdown. He hadn't talked about it until recently. "Someone just asked me. No one had asked me about it before. The conversation took hold." He is now getting in contact with the people affected by the blast and asking them to write about it.
Aside from this trauma, he had, he says, a "happy childhood" in Washington. Like Oskar, he wrote a lot of letters when he was younger but started to write long pieces when at Princeton reading philosophy. He won the freshman, sophomore, junior and senior creative writing prizes and was encouraged by tutor Joyce Carol Oates. One day, inspired by a family photograph of a mystery woman who may have helped his grandfather escape the Nazis, he took a flight to the Ukraine to find out more. The trip lasted only a few days and he never found the woman but the seed of Everything Is Illuminated was sown.
The manuscript was rejected many times before he found an agent. In the meantime, he ghost-wrote a book about prostate cancer and had been working for two years as a receptionist when the news came of his advance. Did he ever have any doubts he would write a successful book? "Of course. I never thought I would," he says. "I've always been full of self-doubt, more than anyone I know. I went to a fancy college, and people would say to my parents, 'what's Jonathan doing now?' 'Oh, he's still a receptionist'."
Yet, the boldness of his work indicates incredible confidence. With his first book he chose a subject that was not only much covered but highly inflammatory, risking accusations of using the tragedy to lend weight to his work. Although a novel, he used himself as a character. At a time when spare, cool, Raymond Carver-esque prose is prevalent, he stuffed it full of adjectives and messy emotion. How did he arrive there?
"It's so funny to talk about writing, because I've only written two books," he says. "It's as if you'd only had two relationships and people treated you like an expert on love." Nevertheless, he tries to explain. "I put myself in the way of as many mistakes as I can," he says. "There's this great line by Brodsky where he says the rhyme is smarter than the poet." This means, he explains, that by giving yourself limitations, in the way that some poets try to make their words rhyme, you find yourself in a more interesting place than if you had no limitations at all. "I create problems for myself and try to find a way out". For instance, he originally wrote the sections of his book in wildly varied lengths but then decided to cut them all down to the same size and then find a way of making this new narrative work. "Otherwise, I would have cut them at the moment of climax or resolution. This way was more interesting."
He rejects the idea that to be a writer you need to be obsessed with writing. "I don't think of it as a romantic act," he says. "Imagine you were someone who likes foreign countries, you wouldn't say you were a great lover of airplanes. You take airplanes to get to where you want to go. That's how I feel about novels. I don't like writing in itself, I just like what it can do. If something came along that was better than a plane, I would take it." So, you may become a painter, instead? "It's totally possible, but it's unlikely. Like, it's unlikely that you could get to Australia in some other way."
Safran Foer is not writing at the moment - "I don't want to get caught up in stupid feelings of productivity and guilt. My goal is to not write as many books as I can" - but when he does he takes his laptop to public places such as cafés. Do you get recognised? "It's now a problem. But being a writer is not like being a movie star. People don't come up and throw their panties."
True, there are few opportunities for writers to feel like Tom Jones. It just so happens, though, that Safran Foer is about to have one of them. He is off to the Hay-On-Wye literary festival, which draws crowds of book groupies to the tiny town on the border with Wales. At his talk, he is interviewed by a woman who asks him, at length, about the critical reception of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The audience becomes restless and a woman speaks up. "You're asking all the wrong questions!" she shouts. "You're missing out the soul of what he writes!" The audience gives her a round of applause.
'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' is published by Hamish Hamilton, £14.99
