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An act of expression: Everything Is Illuminated author
Jonathan Safran Foer
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To Jonathan Safran Foer's dismay, everything is illuminated. And that includes the author himself. It's an unwanted position. Spotlights and success aren't Foer's style, but he grudgingly commits to the publicity mill for the paperback release of his debut, Everything Is Illuminated. Another city. Another hotel. Another suitcase in another hall.
Soft-spoken disenchantment emanates from his voice as he speaks from a Denver hotel. The reporter is new. The questions are the same.
Can't he just draw the blinds, pull up the covers and block it all out? No, he can't.
Those designated as the next "new voice of literature" must take their throne and regale their subjects with insight to life and writing. But Foer doesn't want to be the great and powerful Oz. He wants to be the man behind the curtain.
Just click your heels three times to go home.
Home is what set Foer's path. The Ukraine became his utopia of inspiration. It was there that Foer sought answers. A faded photograph served as his GPS unit.
Who was the lovely, young woman pictured? Had she saved Foer's grandfather from the Nazis? "I had been told she had. No one had been quite sure," Foer says.
Nothing transpired. Well, not that Foer discovered. The story floating through Foer's family tree remains a questionable urban legend. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not. Why was it so important to Foer to travel overseas, looking for the truth about a man he never met?
Foer perks up from the boredom of mundane, been-there-heard-that questions and excitedly proclaims, "I don't know," as if it's a big, fat "thank you" for a long-wanted gift. For once, the author who's been answering questions almost by rote is stumped.
Foer's quest embedded itself as the groundwork for Everything Is Illuminated. Here's a case of fiction that's stranger than truth. Foer delights in naming his protagonist "Jonathan Safran Foer," but he's not studying himself in the vanity mirror. He's investing his self-worth. The cost of character, like author, journeying to the Ukraine with a mysterious photograph (and such quirky fictional accoutrements as a haphazard translator and a dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior) didn't yield high enough dividends.
Questions of autobiographical content perplex Foer. "It certainly takes my life as a springboard," he says, oblivious regarding the potential confusion between author and character. "The book is so clearly fictional."
Foer operates on such a plane of higher logic that he can't see beneath the clouds. His intellect is his auto-pilot. Philosophy, his major when he attended Princeton University, is his jet fuel. There will be no layovers at the George Carlin International Airport.
Foer doesn't bother with comedy in life, just in writing where the serious-minded man ironically succeeds in being witty. "Writing humorously and living humorously are just so completely different. I don't think I come across that funny a lot of the times. I think it was within me," he says. "A lot of times I don't like people who are funny. I feel they're just sucking the air out of the room."
Foer's a unique bird. He's so sedate, so matter-of-fact, in speaking, that you wonder if his heart is still beating. Is he even breathing the same air as the low-brow academics who have given the warm snuggly to his wry, comedic and "clearly fictional" travelogue, a book he didn't intend to write?
"I was thinking of it as an act of expression," he says.
Everything Is Illuminated was top-secret, confidential, for-his-eyes-only. He knew not its outcome nor its purpose. And at one point, the longtime short story writer, winner of the Zoetrope: All Story Fiction Prize in 2000 and editor of the fiction/poetry anthology, Convergence of Birds, realized that he had accidentally written a novel.
"Maybe once I got past 75 pages. I just wasn't worried about it. I think it's much easier to do that out of ignorance," he says or, rather, he philosophizes.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER will sign and discuss Everything Is Illuminated at 7 p.m. Monday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.
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