Jonathan Safran Foer, in a post that is likely fake unless Mr. Foer would like to corroborate it, has responded to Steve Almond’s takedown:
Me and you should hang out, really. With my ironic-ironic-ironic-ironic pretentiousness and profound postmodern invulnerability and your high-school / freshman-year-in-college ironic, I’m-not-pretentiousness-because-I-am-aware-that-I-might-be-pretentious-and-also-because-when-I-feel-that-I’m-being-pretentious-I-go-ahead-and-say-that-I’m-being-pretentious (and I use a lot of cliches in my language, just like on TV and in Hollywood movies) we can be really profound and postmodern and probably we can achieve true art really quickly, in like two minutes, and then after we can eat hot dogs. We can eat nuts from those profoundly sorrowful Nuts 4 Nuts people.
(Thanks, Chelsea!)
Almond is a little hard on Foer, but I think he also makes a few decent points.
Foer’s schtick is pretty funny to start (the whole Ghengis Khan crashing history thing is good), but it gets a little old. Dunno, maybe I’m missing some in jokes here or something . . .
What are the decent points Almond makes, pray tell?
Edward nails him, methinks.
Am I the only tall male Jew in America who likes Jonny Foer?
I’m really starting to get confused as to what is fiction and reality, but it’s funny anyway.
I think the JSF blog is fake. If you’ll look in the archives, it also has posts by John Updike, and a “Robot Machine.” Also, JSF refers to himself too often as postmodern and profound, and “John Updike” talks too much about “not getting” things.
Really, it has to be fake.
Robert,
On a second reading, I change my opinion.
I haven’t read more than 500 words + that many dingbats by JSF (part of an unreadable New Yorker story), so I have no interest in weighing on the merits of Almond’s reviewer’s remorse, but it is ignoble to write a conventional review for a large cirulation daily, keep the rhetoric down so as not to alientate the editors, and then, upon seeing that he’s coming in on the mild side compared to other reviewers, screed out on MobyLives for his regular audience. He says everybody’s bullshit detector is broken. Not so.
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