Jonathan Safran Foer stopped blogging this week (a Google cache of his last entry is here) which is disappointing because, well, he's a good writer.

He is also one of the few novelists with the guts to take on the 9/11 attacks in story form, pull it off with dignity, and produce a story worth reading twice.

In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer tells the story of Oskar Schell, a quirky, 9-year old boy whose father, Thomas, died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Telling the story through the eyes of a nine-year old victim could have turned the whole thing into a cheap tearjerker. But Foer is better than that. Oskar Schell doesn't make you feel any worse about the worst attack against Americans ever, or the lives left destroyed in its wake. (By this point, who could?) But Foer's Oskar provides a new point of view, a new prism through which to look at it and process it all.

Alternating between hysterically funny and deeply sad, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close presents a series of only-in-New York characters, including a 103-year old former war correspondent who has shut himself inside his apartment for decades following his wife's death.

(The plot takes Oskar on a journey through all of New York in search of clues to his father's death, a search that seems impossible but one in which the little boy is determined to finish.)

Foer also gives us the story of Oskar's equally quirky grandparents, who are survivors of the World War II bombing of Dresden. A back-and-forth switch in narrative to show wartime human suffering could have come across as forced; Foer does it naturally.

It's odd, then, to see some Foer's work written off so badly. Take this remark by the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda:

Nope, haven't read him. Lamentably, I've now reached the age where I find it hard to believe I can learn anything from someone in his early to mid twenties.

Lamentable? Maybe. Lame? Probably. In this case, it takes twenty-something Foer to do a terrific job of capturing the point of view of a nine-year old. And if you can't learn from a 9-year old, you can't learn.