Two Kinds of Writers

Jonathan Safran Foer is a smart dude. Like, really super intelligent. Princeton undergraduate. Full-time writer of both fiction and nonfiction. Yada yada yada.

But one thing he doesn’t do, something that might surprise the general reading (and affirm the general non-reading) public, is read much contemporary literature. Who does, then again? I do. But who am I? Not Jonathan Safran Foer.

I concede nothing to you, Jonathan Safran Foer. This isn’t about concessions, though, give or take, tic-tac-toe or what have you—this is about the two types of writers out there, Jonathan Safran Foer included.

Type one: Jonathan Safran Foer and co., those authors who trumpet the virtues of Kafka and Melville like they were their professors, and who are limited in their consumption of the other writers sharing their commercial and cultural environment. I’d say this contributes largely to Jonathan Safran Foer’s giddily idiosyncratic style, which has about as much in common with today’s other writers as a dingo does with your neighbor’s retriever. This doesn’t make him better, necessarily, or worse; it just makes him different, and if you’re into that, then all the more power to you.

Type two: the writers who are hyper aware of the landscape in which they create, and the traditions of which they’re a part, who read lots of contempory lit. Teachers of creative writing like Tobias Wolff, prolific reviewers like Jonathan Lethem and Deborah Eisenberg, these are the guys and girls who can reel off their favorite books of the year on command and who you’re likely to find in bookstores, hobnobbing. I’m all for hobnobbing.

So if you’re an author, guess you can go either way. Just read books, all of you who aren’t writing them. Or Jonathan Safran Foer might have to go into i-banking.