New feature! A periodic update on the lives (professional, that is, with perhaps the occasional emphasis on personal style) of the Jonathans, defined at present as Franzen, Lethem, Safran Foer, and Ames. For today’s Illuminated, courtesy of the always worthwhile L.A. Weekly, Safran Foer talks to Brendan Bernhard about the vast internet conspiracy against him. Throughout the interview, Bernhard notes, the novelist is inexplicably “not wearing an outrageously expensive suit, designer sunglasses and a silk T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Brooklyn’s Richest and Most Critically Acclaimed Young Novelist.’ ” Among other tidbits:

If Foer sounds a bit paranoid about the social status of art and artists, one can more or less understand. True, his paychecks are handsome and he was recently the subject of an adoring profile in The New York Times magazine, but he was also the object of a withering parody in the New York Observer [archived, sorry!], and he claims to be a regular punching bag for envious literati on the Internet.

“I get made fun of very widely,” he says. “I’m a favorite target of bloggers. I mean, really. I don’t look for it, but my little brother is generous enough to forward me the meanest stuff! What can you say? It’s fine. Somebody once said the world is full of petty ‘resentniks’—I love that word, ‘resentniks.’ There are a lot of angry people, and thank God they don’t get their voices out there too much.”

The movie rights to Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close have already been sold, but Foer says he has no interest in adapting his novel for the screen. “I did it. I have nothing more to say about it, and I certainly don’t want to get involved in a process with 4,000 shitheads who’ll think everything I do and say is stupid,” he says firmly. “I don’t like committees.”

Some Stuff, Illuminated [L.A. Weekly]
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close [Meghan O’Rourke and Ruth Franklin, Slate Book Club]

Categories: Jonathans, Books

So you know now which Jonathan it is who’s in the current issue: the shape-shifting Franzen. But many of us in the grip of New Yorker love (not unlike Jimmy Fallon’s for the Red Sox in the Fever Pitch movie or Nick Hornby’s for Arsenal in the book, in that it’s a force of constancy without which our lives would become shabby and crumpled) would have been more or less satisfied with any of them. By which I mean, of course, Lethem, Franzen, and Safran Foer.

Strangely, so often left out of the Jonathan Mafia (a term I use with the utmost affection, I assure you), though—at least by those who prefer life in tidy triangles—is the fearless author of, among others, Wake Up, Sir!, What’s Not To Love? and The Extra Man. That’s Jonathan Ames. What’s not to love, indeed, so I hereby nominate Ames for induction into the public secret society. Perhaps Dave Eggers could whip up an anthology? (See last quoted line of an interview with Ames by Sarah Stodola, below.) There may well be a ripe young Jonathan right now scribbling and coughing in his garret, pining for a chance to be one of the Jonathans. Don’t expire—we’re all waiting for you!

SS: And also, why are there so many male novelists named Jonathan these days (in addition to you and Foer, Lethem also comes immediately to mind, and Franzen)?

JA: I once addressed this in an essay for Bookforum and I wrote that I was like the weird brother in this family of brothers named Jonathan, that I was the pin-headed one who would go missing but then would be found in the woods screwing sap-holes in trees. I somehow saw this as a Medieval family of brothers named Jonathan. But I had to cut that paragraph because of the word-count. I don’t know where that paragraph might be. And I forget the exact topic of the essay, but it was something about how I screwed up my literary career by choosing the wrong subtitle for my memoir, What’s Not to Love? The subtitle was/is: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer. At the time I thought it would be catchy, but the result has been to see the word pervert associated repeatedly with my name. And so I had come to realize (in the Bookforum essay) that I was bad at marketing—that using the word “genius” as Dave Eggers had done was a much better idea.

SS: Yeah, I don’t think anyone who would like to remain sane should try to compete with Eggers in the arena of marketing…

JA: Not trying to compete. I admire D. Eggers. He’s remarkable in many different ways.

You Once Said: An Interview with Jonathan Ames [Me Three]

Categories: Jonathans