The boy who knew too much

Fans of Foer's celebrated first novel, ''Everything Is Illuminated," will recognize the eager fluency of Oskar's voice, and the story he tells has been skillfully assembled. It concerns a mysterious key he finds after his father's death, which leads him to race around New York City searching for clues and charming the pants off everyone he meets. He rescues old men from emotional atrophy and makes grown women swoon.

This is his assigned role: the troubled child as saint. Foer clearly wants us to view Oskar's charm as a defense. Unfortunately, the boy is so relentlessly self-aware that he winds up explaining his feelings to the reader, rather than dramatizing them. After his mother takes him to visit a psychiatrist (whom he naturally outwits) Oskar tells us, ''We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing 'Hey Jude.' It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how." These direct pleas for sympathy begin to feel, after a time, more like strong-arming.

Oskar is forever proposing inventions that will save people, such as a pocket large enough to store loved ones. ''But I knew that there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone." It's a lovely line, of course, wise and true, which is why plunking it in the mouth of a 9-year-old feels stagy.

This tendency to play to the balconies makes it tough to regard Oskar as an actual little boy. He comes off more as an authorial creation: a collection of lovable quirks bundled around a defining tragedy.

Foer fares better with Oskar's grandparents, survivors of the Dresden fire-bombing, whose haunting stories anchor the book in history.