Road fiction's new direction

"I would say most of the details in the book that sound at all poetic didn't happen in life," he confesses. "My experience was very flat, very uninspired and very disappointing. I would not have written a book had I had an experience that was as profound as the kind that I tried to write."

Returning to Prague that student summer, he sat down to write. "The most really creative 10 weeks of my life, and probably the most alive I've ever felt," he says.

It then took years to craft the 300 pages into something readable. Prague must have filtered into his lexicon. Sit down in any restaurant, and you'll find English-language menus strewn with Alex-isms: "fine poultry soup abounding with vitamins".

We pass the Kafka Café and wend our way round to the ancient Jewish cemetery and synagogue. Hitler, while annihilating 77,229 Czech Jews, intended to preserve this corner of Prague as a Jewish museum.

Today's Prague flaunts its Jewish past whorishly, cluttering its tourist traps with longfaced Hassidic puppets and ceramic Golems. "There is really no life here," says Foer, "only a record of life."

He has come back to make a documentary for BBC4 and scout locations for a Warner Bros movie of Everything is Illuminated that starts shooting next year, with heart-throb Elijah Wood in the Jonathan role. The director is actor Liev Schreiber, who has also written the screenplay; Liev's family also came from these parts.

"I still really don't know why I went," says Foer. "I never wrestled with 'Where did I come from?' I guess it must have had to do with where I was in life - thinking seriously about what I wanted to do, and about writing. In a way, the trip became a trip about finding out why I was making the trip in the first place."

Back at Princeton, he submitted a more fully realised version of the novel as part of his final thesis. It sold, soon after, to a publisher for half a million dollars, the news reaching him while he was temping on a switchboard in New York.

The novel now seems set to become a sort of Ukrainian road movie, its rich historical sections sacrificed to the cinematic urge for momentum. "The film," Foer admits, "moves very far from the book." He estimates that only about 25 per cent remains the same.

"I think it's good. It's not how I would have done it, but that's that whole point: if Liev would have done it as I would have, there would have been no need to do it at all."

Literary New York can be a mean place, and typing Jonathan Safran Foer's name into Google taps into a canon of snarky anecdotage. I first interviewed Foer a couple of years ago, the evening after he had won the Guardian First Book Award.

He had with him a fat, red puffer jacket that kept erupting from behind his chair. He is more in control of his wardrobe now, but is no less generous and genuine, no less thoughtful.

Back then, he likened the act of writing to hauling himself out of bed in order to note something down, something that nagged and niggled and refused to go away. Now, he likens it to singing in the shower of a morning.

There have been other changes, too: moving from his Jackson Heights apartment into a house in newly gentrified Brooklyn, he recently wed fellow author Nicole Krauss. Both have second novels due next year, Foer's based around a 10-yearold New Yorker named Oscar (a movie omen?). Provisionally titled I'm Alright, it is now entering the publisher's catalogue as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

While the movie is bound to win Foer a new readership, his hopes for it are more personal. He never knew the maternal grandfather whose saviour he set out to find, but, growing up in Washington DC, he had a very close relationship with his grandmother.

She is understandably proud of her grandson the novelist, but he regrets that while Everything is Illuminated has been translated into more languages than he can name, she will never be able to read it in her own mother tongue, Yiddish.

"I'm excited for the movie to be made in part because I think it's something that she'll respond to a little more," he observes. "It's something she'll be able to enjoy more."