Sandbox

Johnathan Safran Foer was on campus last week.

For those of you who don’t read enough to know who this man is, I can provide a little bit of background: He’s the literary standout behind Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Written from the perspectives of a non-native English-speaking Safran Foer himself and an eight-year-old interested in training his anus to talk, the narratives are fractured like nothing you’ve ever seen—it makes Burroughs look downright readable.

Moreover, Foer is the type of writer who knows how to capitalize on a global tragedy, basing his books around the Holocaust, 9/11 and, most recently, the injustices of the modern food industry. In doing so, he is able to take advantage of his readers’ pre-existing emotions, liberating him from the limiting task of creating compelling characters and stories. And, because readers have already decided how they feel about war crimes and untrustworthy corporations, Foer doesn’t have to evoke any of the emotions himself. It’s all very liberating, and frees the young writer up to spend more time on flip-books, like the one at the end of his second novel.

It’s things like that flip-book that make me feel the way I do about Johnathan Safran Foer. It’s the way he asks important questions, like “What if, instead of jumping out of burning buildings to the ground below, people did the opposite?” Foer’s unwillingness to accept the tragedies of our past as they stand trivializes them into near-oblivion.

And I think Foer provoked an important question this week. You could almost hear him thinking it to himself: “How long can I keep pulling stunts like these, getting invited to speak at elite institutions with some of the best English departments in the world