“I’m not interesting,” Jonathan Safran Foer announced when I asked him to come out of his palatial home and breathe some oxygen. “People assume that because I’m a writer, I’m naturally interesting. They couldn’t be more wrong. I’m a sad piece of driftwood and the biggest disappointment since Steve Perry left Journey.”
Of course, I tried to cajole poor Foer with some of the trademark wit I used in my one-page Q&As. I asked Foer if he considered stabbing himself because of his youth and his wealth, pointing out the slam-dunk posterity advantages of an early Sylvia Plath-like literary death. I asked Foer if he ever thought about throwing himself in an oven just to see what life might have been like for his grandfather, had not the mystery woman saved him. Casual jokes to make Foer smile. But Foer was adamant about his cipher status.
“I just watched Behind the Music last night,” he said. “I spent all day in bed, trying to work myself up to write. In desperation, I turned on the tube. When I saw Daryl Hall reveal how hard it was for him to write ‘Maneater,’ how he too had spent years working up the courage to be a great artist. I…I wish I could offer you something a little more….” He stopped midsentence and stared at my decolletage.
“Manly?” I ventured.
“No, something fierce and more representative of the Caucasian race,” he said by way of desperation. “Something along the lines of Daryl Hall. Have you been dating?”
“No,” I said. “Most people are afraid to talk with me because I’m such a bitch.”
I looked at his wiry physique and I saw a beautiful 28 year old boy rather than a writer. I saw a few of my own neuroses in Foer and wondered how he might feel against me in bed. Would he read me Nabokov? Could I be his Humbert Humbert?
My friends had warned me of Fatal Attraction types, but there was something of the easy conquest represented in the 150 e-mail messages he sent me every hour. I did everything in my power to resist his attraction, even comparing him to Liberace. But I realized that I could not resist the man who had penned Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
*applause*
Bravo!
It is all so far beyond ridiculous…
at least foer didnt speak in ukranian dialect inflected english for the piece.
is solomon’s next piece gonna be on the dude who wrote the davinci code?