![]() ![]() It is a voice first adopted 50 years ago by JD Salinger, the one in which he explored how the impossibly nuanced lives of the Glass family might shatter in modern America. ![]() It is the New York voice of a child who moves too smartly, thinks too laterally and feels too sensitively for the outside world ever quite to match up to his inner brilliance. ![]() But for all its apparatus of confronting the fact of the attack on the Twin Towers, an apparatus which includes, at the back of the book, a reverse flip-through photographic sequence of a person leaping from the burning building, Safran Foer's novel is most specifically a stylistic exercise, an appropriation of a singular American voice. At first glance, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is Safran Foer's post-9/11 book, his attempt to tackle the question of America's principal anxiety: why aren't we safe any more? In this, it joins a growing canon that includes Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint, and Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World university literature modules beckon. ![]()
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