After the publication of his first novel, ”Everything is Illuminated,” in 2002, 20-something author Jonathan Safran Foer was heralded as something of a wunderkind in the literary world.
But, he told The Chronicle in a telephone interview, “I was lucky; it was a series of accidents.”
And, he said, the other ingredient of the success that he has achieved is hard work. “It has nothing to do with inspiration, or the muse. It is just keeping at it, continuing to work,” Foer said.
In 2005, Houghton Mifflin published Foer’s second novel, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” which is set in New York City on and immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. With the release of the paperback edition on April 5, Foer is touring the country and will read from his latest novel at the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop, 2559 N. Downer Avenue on Tuesday, April 18, at 7 p.m.
An important piece of Foer’s “luck” fell on him while he was an undergraduate at Princeton University. He said his heart just wasn’t in his major subject, philosophy, and he was, he claims, “a mediocre philosophy student.”
But, he signed up for some creative writing courses, “on a whim,” he said, and while at home in Washington, D.C., on a school break halfway through the semester, he received a letter from his writing professor, the literary giant Joyce Carol Oates.
A writer’s energy
“She said, ‘You appear to have the most important of all writerly qualities and that is energy,’” Foer said. “She was the first person ever to make me feel I should take my writing seriously.”
“I agree with [Oates] that [energy] is the most important quality, more important than intelligence, more important even than having something to say is having the energy on the sentence level and on the book level, the energy of finding the thing to say, of investing in it,” he said.
Although at Princeton he “realized [writing] was something [he] wanted to take more seriously,” Foer has held “plenty of office jobs” and he didn’t love any of them, he said.
“I choose to write. Every day I choose. Unlike another kind of job where you have a boss and a schedule, no one forces me to do it every day.”
Married to author Nicole Krause for the past year and a half, Foer said he works outside of his Brooklyn home, mostly in a café, while she works at home.
And though he chooses to write, and “never write anything for other people,” Foer’s writing seems to take him down a road where he is propelled on by discovering what lies there without a specific destination in mind. And he seems to delight in the responses he gets from readers.
“It is proven over and over again that we can’t anticipate people’s responses to a book. We think the people who will respond to our writing will be people like us, but then we find that isn’t the case. It shows that there are things deeper than the color of our skin, our religion …
“The thing that I like about books is that each person takes away something very different, and it’s important to me that that not be infringed on.”
Raised in a self-described secular Jewish home, Foer said that being Jewish influences everything he writes.
“My [parents’] home was culturally very Jewish,” he said. “The books, the tone of the dinner table conversation, the volume at which we spoke, the jokes …”
When asked about his next work, Foer chafed. “I try to be on to the next thing, but it’s hard.” Noting the constant demand for stories from news writers, he said that the sense of scale has become perverted.
“Little things become big things and big things sometimes get squashed down into little things,” Foer said. “I never want that to happen to me,” Foer said.
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