For instance, there was that petition asking New Line Cinema to change the title of "The Two Towers" because the title too closely evoked the moniker of the World Trade Center buildings.

Coming this August is the movie "World Trade Center," an Oliver Stone flick about the last two Port Authority police officers pulled out alive from the rubble of the twin towers.

Popular culture icons such as Spiderman, Captain America and Daredevil, New York dwellers all, were shown helping out in the aftermath of the attacks in the "Black Issue," an Amazing Spiderman comic book that had a plain black cover.

Musicians such as Bruce Springsteen, Ani DiFranco and Conor Oberst penned songs about the tragedy. And although it wasn’t as easy to do it back then, comics like Jon Stewart have become more and more vocal at lampooning what they perceive as enormous failings on the part of the American government before and after the attacks.

But there is one particular work, in my opinion at least, that has come out of all this furor and has managed to retain a bit of innocence and wonder alongside the fear and the distrust that such an infamous event can leave on the world.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’’ is a novel that talks about getting over grief, finding comfort in strangers, and learning from the lessons of the past. The book does all of this with an air of whimsy, innocence, and a lot of heart.

The novel’s protagonist is nine-year-old Oskar Schell, an "inventor, amateur entemologist, computer consultant, francophile, letter writer, pacifist, amateur astronomer, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, great explorer, jeweller, origamist, detective, vegan and collector of butterflies." His father was one of the thousands of people who died when the towers collapsed, and Oskar has trouble moving on, as any nine-year-old would.

He thinks that his mother is slowly forgetting all about his father, that her getting close to a male friend is unfair. He has grown afraid of suspension bridges, germs, airplanes, fireworks, Arabs, tall buildings, and a host of other things a nine-year-old would have a lot of trouble avoiding. He keeps all these feelings bottled up inside him, and he spends his nights awake for hours and hours, waiting to fall asleep but unable to do so.

Everything changes when he discovers a key, hidden inside an envelope with the word "Black" written on it in red ink, in his father’s old room. Oskar embarks on a journey to find out the owner of the key and the lock it opens, and as he goes on this journey he encounters equally tormented people who help him conquer his own fears and give him the strength to reach his own emotional catharsis.

Just as in his critically-acclaimed first novel, "Everything is Illuminated," Foer takes on a theme that is the staple in every young adult and fantasy novel ever published—the young man on a quest. The hero of his first novel was searching for his past, Oskar is looking for a lock, and both young men meet quirky and touching characters in between. And while a lesser author would succumb to the temptation of just rehashing what he’s already written before, Foer successfully manages to dodge that mistake.

Oskar is definitely different from the hero of Foer’s first novel, and this nine-year-old genius is a masterful creation by Foer. Oskar’s intelligence is definitely beyond question, but it is his naivete and innocence that prevent him from sounding like an adult trapped in a child’s body and gives him a charm that will definitely endear him to readers.

Foer also cleverly avoids using sentimentality from illustrating the sadness Oskar feels since the death of his father. When Oskar cries, it is written in plain, simple prose (‘I cried in the lobby of an apartment building in Corona), and it is only when Oskar sets his mind to inventing things—such as a Reservoir of Tears—that one can really feel the impact of the sadness that he feels.

Oskar’s narrative is interspersed with letters telling the story of his grandfather and grandmother, who had suffered through the bombing of Dresden, one of the many gruesome events perpetrated during the Second World War. Unlike Oskar, though, the stories of these older people are much more poignant, because they carry the wounds of their trauma well into their future.

Their lives are also perfect opportunities for Foer to once again weave his way with words. In the lives of Oskar’s ancestors, Foer has the freedom to tell stories of unrequited love, teenage passion, and the tragedy of growing old.

There is one scene in particular that affected me immensely. Tasked by her mute husband to write the story of her life on a typewriter, Oskar’s grandmother performs the task despite her failing eyesight. When she proudly shows her husband her finished work, he is met with a terrible surprise. All that she had given him were blank pages, and this simple act makes Oskar’s grandfather look back at his whole life.

Also present in this book are the writing conceits that made Everything Is Illuminated such an entertaining read. There are pages that contain nothing at all, pictures of locks, fingerprints, even tennis player Lleyton Hewitt, random images that manage to become part of a cohesive whole in Foer’s capable hands.

However, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is by no means a perfect book. Some of his quirks often start to feel gimmicky, such as filling up three pages with nothing but numbers and another three pages with nothing at all. One can’t help but feel a balk a little at having to go through a page that only contains one sentence, sometimes even less. And the picture of a body jumping from the World Trade Center, even years after the tragedy, is still a very creepy thing to look at.

There are also moments when the character of Oskar becomes a bit too precocious to be believed, such as when he plays the recording of a Hiroshima survivor to his classmates and then launching into an explanation of the nuclear bomb’s after-effects.

But despite these flaws, readers will finish "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" with a feeling of catharsis, hope, and poignancy. In this book, Foer is unafraid to push against the boundaries of comfort and refuses to employ sentimentality and melodrama to give us a touching story about grief and letting go, and because of this, the novel—and the spirit of those affected by those horrible attacks—prevails.