Jonathan Safran Foer interview

Courtesy The Millions, a lit blog, a lovely interview with the writer. If you like reading that kind of thing.

Fiction is the opposite of certainty. That was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book now. Because the way that the story of Sept. 11 was being told was with absolute certainty. That’s the American version. It is, "This is what happened. There is good. There is evil. There are victims and there are victimizers. There are terrorists and civilians. There is war and there is peace. There are Arabs and non-Arabs." And that is not what the world is. The world is this incredibly complicated mix of perspectives and vantages and life experiences. And when you write a book, you are able to concentrate on very, very specific things. Individuals doing very specific acts. Orhan Pamuk once said that every book, at the end of the day is about showing how similar people are to one another. And how different they are from one another. And you do that by showing how somebody pours coffee and drinks it. It’s not by speaking about diplomacy. It’s not by troop movements.

Yes, but journalists also write novels, many of them about war: Hemingway, Crane, and Greene come to mind.

Update: LA Weekly has another Foer interview, in which he starts sounding a little Eggerish, claiming to be the "most hated writer in America." Really, Jon, I think you've got a long way to go until you get to the level of Tom Wolfe.

Speaking of journalists, I happened to find this year-old interview with Gay Talese. You can read online the famous piece referenced in the interview, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold". And that led me to this stunning profile of Charlie Kaufman, a metawriter for our age.