The Story
Jonathan Safron Foer "Illuminates" PBK This Friday
Jonathan Safran Foer to perform at PBK on March 28th. Courtesy of UCAB.
Last night I had a dream where a series of black SUVs drove by me with sprawling white, block-lettered stickers in their back windows reading Jonathan Safran Foer. On the one hand, it makes sense that he would be on my mind, as he is speaking at the College this Friday, March 28, and I planning to write a preview of his speech. On the other, it is only a dreamworld that would have authors names emblazoned on the back of a gas-guzzling social menace. Why the stickers, I wonder?
Jonathan Safran Foer will be here in a matter of hours. More than a handful of hours, don’t get me wrong, but soon enough that he has made my calendar of events. The author of such overwhelmingly lucrative sellers as “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and “Everything is Illuminated” (which was adapted to film in 2005) will roll into PBK at 8 p.m. to deliver a notoriously funny speech entitled, “When Jews Laugh at Things That Aren't Funny.” And it is free, people - lucky us.
Some are familiar with this popular and intelligent - though at times precocious - author’s works. Good for you if you are one of those people - if you get there early enough, you can get a ticket to the reception after the speech, which will be held in the Dodge Room. The first 100 people at PBK on Friday have a chance to speak with this prince of contemporary fiction; let the scratching and seduction begin. But some of you have no clue who this man is. I will illuminate (I know, that isn’t funny).
Jonathan Safran Foer is young. So absurdly young that is makes my stomach curdle to think I will not write anything as long, much less as successful, as his novels before I reach his age. Or twice his age. He went to Princeton, which means he knows a hell of a lot, and he is teaching at Yale this year. We are all impressed. But those are hardly reasons to go and see him. Everyone is surely thinking, “On a Friday night! UCAB is out of their minds.”
Consider, however, that you have the opportunity to not only hear from, but also potentially hold a discussion with, one of the few American authors that has had the audacity to write about 9/11. He has been praised in god-like fashion, he has been lambasted, he has been dismissed and discarded, all for that audacity, but the fact of the matter is that, regardless of any debate about his artistic accomplishments, Foer has written when few authors have dared write.
I have always had faith that writing had the power to analyze, instruct and potentially affect a society. At times in the history of the world, epics have served that purpose; theater, poetry, essays, novels, movies - each has served as the “unacknowledged legislator” (to steal from Shelley). Recent times have seen fiction give way to screenplay, in many ways, as the great artistic influence. But Foer has held on to fiction as a means of commentary. “Everything is Illuminated” as a movie was far less successful than the book.
In November 2007, The Atlantic Monthly published an edition asking a number of well-known thinkers to describe the future of the “American idea.” One respondent was an author equally imminent to Foer, David Foster Wallace. Wallace posed the dangerous, and still unanswered, question: “What if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea?”
In many ways, that question is touched by the scope of Foer’s works. He doesn’t answer the question, but he pushes towards a better understanding of it. Within that attempt is the reason that each student should hear Foer speak. Quite often our concerns for the state of the world are deflected by politic and decorum. Foer is the sort of intelligent, well-known figure that will not back down from important and pressing questions about important and pressing events. The arrival of a provocative, insightful speaker who will surely amuse and educate us, as well as respond to our own thoughts, should excite each of us.
A free talk by a world-famous writer versus going out early to a party? That should be easy.
I am still not sure about the SUVs. They could represent some terrible, insatiable desire of mine to see authors as famous as movie stars (J.K. Rowling alone does not count). They could be more symbolic of something like “the truth” and Foer as the lead to “the truth.” That would be corny and I would boycott dreams for the remainder of my life if that were the real significance. There is the whole good versus evil crap. Perhaps I had a premonition and Foer will arrive in a motorcade with each vehicle sporting a banner with his name on it. Who knows? Maybe I will ask him if he has the same dreams. Maybe that is what it was all about.