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Q: Extremely Loud is an intensely emotional book. Do you think part of the self-consciousness results from tackling these fraught situations?

A: I think that a lot of times the art that reaches the most people is the art that the creator of which thought was the most esoteric and personal. What I feel a lot of the time when I’m writing is, this is just me. And implicit in that is, I am not anybody else, and it’s impossible for anyone to have the same feeling. But that’s like the most wonderful thing about writing — the way it dispels that myth. It’s the way that it shows you again and again and again — whether you’re a writer or reader, it’s exactly the same — that you are, well, less alone than you thought you were. Despite huge geographical distances, despite incredible distances in background, distances in time, there are people that share some really fundamental thing with you.

Q: How do you mean?

A: I was in Japan a couple months ago and walking through some of the gardens and felt really deeply moved. I felt like somebody was expressing something I wanted to express. Someone was uttering a truth that was also my own truth. And I stepped back and I said, "Oh my God. These gardens were designed literally thousands of years ago by somebody who didn’t speak English, didn’t use the Internet, didn’t use a pencil, didn’t have clothes with zippers. And yet here we are, somehow sharing something really deep."

And that realization does two things. One is to say this is the power of art and this is the point of art — to get to that really fundamental stuff that people can share. And two, it puts into perspective the things that you think make you. Particularly in America. I mean, what’s the question you ask when you meet somebody? It’s always, "What do you do?" Well, why is that such an important question? And does that really get at who people really are? And is that really the point of meeting people and talking to people? I think art is the best way of getting at who people are. And again, it’s as true for readers as it is for writers. I feel it’s the way that culture’s best expressed, not through business, not through politics, but through making things.

Q: You mention politics. Do you think of this as a political book?

A: There are so many different ways to answer that. The world so often happens in capital-letter words: capital-A America, capital-M Muslim, or capital-J Justice. And capital-letter words are words that speak on behalf of many things. One thing literature does, I think, is that it really involves itself with lowercase-letter words — very specific, very precise, very accurate renderings of people and places in the world. And there’s this funny thing where the more specific you get, the more general a point you can make.

How beneficial would it be right now to see an Iraqi or a Syrian or a Saudi Arabian pour a cup of coffee and sit and eat breakfast and talk to his family? That simple gesture that isn’t loaded with all sorts of capital-letter implications can express something really deep. Because you say, "Hey, I pour coffee too, and I sit and talk with my family, and it’s interesting how he does it that’s different than how I do it, and it’s interesting how it’s similar." Politicians are so busy trafficking in these capital-letter words that they end up saying very little. Artists do just the opposite. They concern themselves with the specific and end up being able to address big themes, and it’s not dishonest.

Q: What’s your response to people who are bound to say that it’s too early to respond to September 11th this way?

A: You can say that your book didn’t do it right, but to say you shouldn’t try is ridiculous. The whole point of art is that you can try anything. That’s what’s good about it, the allowance to explore things. But I would also wonder why someone would have that instinct. Was it too soon for a newscaster to show images from it? Was it too soon for that book 102 Minutes that details the last minutes? And if it’s not too soon for that but it is too soon for this, then what are we saying about how we value things and whose voices we trust? Like do I trust Peter Jennings more than I trust Jonathan Franzen? I don’t. At the very least, I trust them both. I trust that I want to hear both kinds of storytelling. Honestly, I think it’s people who are either afraid of or just hate art that say things like that. I think the thing that it always boils down to is a distrust of art.

Q: Were you trying to send a message with this book?

A: When I was writing about this, I really didn’t want to write something with a political message. I think one can be political without having a point or a message. I think there are probably senses in which it is fairly strongly political. Like having Dresden and September 11th in the same book begs an awful lot of questions — like what does it mean to be a victim, or a victimizer? Or what does it mean for an act against civilians being commensurate with damage that the country that represents them has done? That’s how Dresden was defended. We said, "Well, it’s commensurate with what the Germans had done. You are a German citizen. You are held responsible." And agree or disagree — and I would disagree — there are lots of people in the world who think that’s what September 11th was. "Hey, this is commensurate with what America has been doing in the Middle East, and this is the form of punishment that is being doled out." So, I think there’s a lot to be learned from comparing those two events and thinking about just how fluid and just how unfixed those roles are: who’s guilty, who’s the victim, what’s fair, what’s unfair, what’s terror, what’s war.

But even more than that, I think the real politics of the book is just showing what it’s like to suffer because of war. I don’t know that "bin Laden wanted dead or alive" means anything. I don’t think that even phrases like "bringing democracy to the Arab world" mean that much. Because it is trying to speak for so much. But showing a boy who lost somebody really can tell you something about war.

Q: Because it’s more personal.

A: I think that with Fahrenheit 9/11, one of the things that I found so powerful was when he showed the images from Iraq, and you know, it’s like, "Jesus, I didn’t know that that’s what it was like." I think the reason is that we’ve forgotten what these images actually are. We’re so accustomed to talking about them and abstracting them in political truths that they’re no longer human truths. And seeing what it looks like for a human being to suffer is such an awful thing. It’s like the whole argument that no one would eat meat if they had gone to the factory farms. And so when you write a book, you have a chance to look at something and ask people to look at something, and I thought this kid’s story was a worthwhile thing to look at.