Something huge happened a few years ago, and it turned a lot of people into zombies. Case in point: I just sat here for ten minutes staring at a pencil sharpener thinking not only how I should finish that first sentence but whether I should. By ‘something huge’ I’m referring to Tragedy That Shall Not Be Named, whose anniversary equals the number you dial when you think a tragedy might be occurring. Perhaps that clarification is only needed for those who cannot count how many Tragedies with a capital ‘t’ occurred, broadly speaking, ‘a few years ago.’ As a sage professor reminded – okay, told – me the other day, a lot of dastardly writing about 9/11 has been done by very capable writers. So, allow me to attempt either that or its opposite, good writing by a bad writer, because it’s been done before. It won’t hurt anyone to hear a little more.
As relative youngsters looking for people to whom we can attach the passionate, proximate feelings of contempt or admiration, we tend to get rather blinkered in our vision, or perhaps obsessed. We may be overwhelmed by the size of the Olin library stacks, so we affix on a small number of writers. We may be stubborn and close-minded, or just ideologically loyal, monogamous, malleable fools letting only the select few impress us. We form strange fascinations and loyalties. A few of mine are: my high school math teacher, Maureen Dowd, the BBC News website, Henry James, and the flavor of the week: Jonathan Safran Foer, whom I am using until I exhaust him as my latest source of incitement.
But here’s an ethical dilemma: I haven’t read either of his books, neither the precious Everything Is Illuminated, nor the lucrative Extremely Loud and Incredibly Up Close, just released. So this isn’t a book review – it’s merely a rambling rant on the choices this young financially endowed man has made. The fact is, I haven’t read his book not because I don’t have time and not because I’m lazy and not because I’m stubborn, but chiefly because I don’t like nice people, and Foer is a nice, nice person. Example: sometimes he refuses to accept cash prizes from prestigious literary foundations, and sometimes he strikes up long, in my opinion blithering, but thoughtful correspondences with his interviewers, fragments of which we lucky, young(est) writers are privileged enough to see in places like the New York Times Magazine, where we are stunned and awed by this prodigious Princeton grad who has already – in fact, long since – ‘made it’ in the literary world.
Did anyone ever ask Jonathan a generic, “How do you decide what to write about?” His answer, after filtration through my ego, might be, “Well, I decided to write about the most behemoth catastrophes befalling our world today. Firstly, I’m going to write about the Holocaust, then I’m going to write about 9/11, then I’m going to write about – oh wait, there’s nothing else to write about.”
Unfortunately for me, Foer would never say any of that, because he’s a Nice Guy who has proven that such people do occasionally finish first, if a one million dollar advance at age 27 for Extremely Loud constitutes finishing first. But why did the new book (which features a flip book of a man reverse-free-falling from the World Trade Center, i.e. ascending to heaven) deserve the advance? Because his first book sold millions. Why? Because it received good hype and good press. How? Because Foer was young and won four writing prizes at Princeton. And why? Because the book was good, or so I hear – just the kind of good you want to hate but can’t, because it makes you feel awed, humbled, amused, and perhaps even warm inside. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t particularly want to read anything that’s going to make me feel warm inside.
But the question remains, was his subject matter, in both cases, a crutch? Did it bolster his sense of self-worth as a writer, guarantee the lasting effect of his writing, and inspire him, because he was writing about something so huge? I failed for a long time to think that writing about the Holocaust could have been a difficult choice for him, because I had the sense that our culture, collectively, will never tire of the Holocaust or 9/11, to which I added an eye-roll, until I realized why we’ll never tire of them. I’ll get to that in a minute.
I blame Foer for the ‘writer’s constipation’ from which I suffered for most of the two weeks of spring break, when, after reading the Times magazine article, I battled with the questions, “Why bother when people like Foer are making all the money?” and “Why bother because Foer and millions of others have already done it?” besides the obvious “Why, oh why did Foer do it?” But lately I’ve calmed down. I’m writing again, mostly because I have deadlines, and I’m starting to accept that there are a trillion things worthy of reading and writing about that don’t fall under the oeuvres of Dan Brown or Danielle Steele or Foer (a few of the popular kids.) I’ve even checked out Everything Is Illuminated, though it’s gathering dust, because I’m more interested in the smaller, episodic dilemmas that everyone forgets because they are scattered, isolated molehills at the foot of Tsunami-Darfur mountains. What about good ol’ sexism? The death of a pet? “The O.C.”?
Okay, so maybe Foer is onto something – anyone who isn’t completely self-involved is onto something, which is not to say we’re all going to jump on the bandwagon of that something. As the writer Richard Bausch remarked to a Russell House audience only moments ago, the criminals responsible for our culture’s biggest wounds (opened and reopened nauseatingly and necessarily by people like Foer) “must be erased from the history books,” but the crimes they committed can and should not be, and so far, by buying Foer’s books, we haven’t let them. Foer may have departed from authenticity by writing a fictional account of 9/11, but his first book was his story, the story of his family and their role in the Holocaust, and he didn’t choose it really – it chose him; he found himself obligated to tell it. I only wish he hadn’t been advanced one million dollars to display three hundred pages of empathy – no, sympathy – for the people directly affected by 9/11 (and the rest of us.) But he’s a nice guy. This is what he does, and I applaud him for being selfless and young at exactly the same time. Am I wrong in thinking this is a rarity? And if this rarity can, indeed, occasionally write well, I might occasionally consider reading what he has to say.
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