Why We're So Lucky to Have JSF...

Excerpt from a 2003 interview with Robert Birnbaum at identitytheory.com:

This interview was done while JSF was promoting his first book, Everything is Illuminated. He had not yet written Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Eating Animals, or Tree of Codes. This excerpt reveals why JSF is the perfect author to come to KO.

JSF: Yes. I love talking. I love talking about books, and I love talking to young people. On my book tour for the hard back I did a reading every night, and in the mornings I would go to high schools and just talk about books. Not my book, I didn't read or anything like that. One of the worst problems going now is how little younger people read. It's entirely our fault. Books are just not brought to younger people in the same way that movies are or music is. It's not that they are incapable of reading very sophisticated books, because they are. More capable than a lot of older people. The problem is something embedded in the culture right now, the writing culture. A fear of a certain kind of advertising. A fear of books becoming too much like music or movies. The Oprah problem was a symptom of it, of people's hesitancy. My feeling about Oprah was that there were a lot of bad side effects to what she was doing, but they were so far outweighed by the good things her program was doing. She read a lot of really good books—some really dumb books but a lot of really good books to a lot of people--who wouldn't otherwise have read anything.

RB: I think there is a legitimate concern about marketing books in the way that other things are marketed. It's very much about what is chosen.

JSF: The fact of the matter is, there are going to be a lot of ugly things about it, and it is going to be the case that probably writers probably for reasons other than the quality of their books are going to be more heavily promoted. And it will be the case that there will be a greater discrepancy between the people who make a lot of money and the people who make no money. As is the case in music, Britney Spears makes all the money and she sucks.

RB: Are you sure you want to go public with this?

JSF: Sure. On the other hand the entire industry is lifted such that independent bands can survive. There are lots of small bands that are getting by…

RB: Why do you say that?

JSF: I am not saying they are making millions of bucks, but they are capable of coming out with records and having people listen. Young people are listening to more music than they are reading books. And people who listen to Britney Spears, their taste diversifies as they get older and they are exposed to different things and there is room for those different things. Because everybody has a CD player and a shelf for CDs. With books, young people aren't getting in the habit of reading. Reading is considered an act of self-improvement. Work. Homework. Probably something you are not smart enough to do and enjoy. If just the act of reading were more present. It's like the Harry Potter question, I suppose. Is Harry Potter good? Harry Potter is good. Getting people in the practice of reading enables them to have their tastes diversify later.

RB: All this points to the failure of pedagogical models. I see this in history, which might be why our politics are rife with such silliness. But in terms of literature, I recall having very little interest in so-called classics in high school and I was an avid reader. What can Dickens and Tolstoy and Victor Hugo mean to a 15-year-old?

JSF: Very little at first. You need a kind of gateway drug. Toni Morrison can mean a lot to a kid in high school. And Kurt Vonnegut and Dave Eggers can mean a lot. And that's great and they should mean a lot. JD Salinger still means something to everybody, it seems like. And you get curious. And you say, "What is this all about? And what inspired these writers? What were they reading when they were my age? How does all this fit together?" It's not quite that deliberate obviously or contrived. But one thing does lead to another. The important thing is to start the habit.

RB: Well. I wonder if there is still this high value placed on suffering an education to be effective. You must memorize and pound things into your head. To fill yourself with things of which you haven't a clue to their relevance in your life—because that's supposed to be knowledge.

JSF: There is a hierarchy established and students are at the bottom of it. You try to climb this ladder of knowledge and learn things. If you don't like Middlemarch it's because you have a problem and when you are more sophisticated you will like Middlemarch. There is a moment that a lot of students have when they say, "Wait a minute, maybe it's not my fault. Maybe it's Middlemarch's fault. And here's proof because I like this other book. I like Catcher in the Rye." And it's one of those wonderful moments of "I am not alone, I am not dumb. This just wasn't for me." And that's what's great about books: the entire purpose of the enterprise is to hook up like minds. To say this is for me, this is how I would express myself if I were somebody capable of doing this.

RB: That doesn't work for me. This notion of "like minds." There are books and writing I like because it is not what I think or how I think and that I may not even really understand…

JSF: I wasn't saying anything that is in conflict with that. There is a learning process inherent in books. The reason you stick with the Toni Morrison and maybe don't stick with Finnegan's Wake or some other thing is because you feel like at the end of the day you are going to learn something human, not really something intellectual. At the bottom of that is that you think that Toni Morrison and you have something in common. Something deeper than the circumstances of our lives that has to do with being a person. And being afraid of dying or wanting to fall in love or wanting to be healthy or whatever it is. Her rather unusual way of saying it may just be in the interest of saying it more strongly. Not to teach you a lesson but to say these very fundamental things with as much volume and clarity ultimately as is possible.

RB: And saying them differently is what keeps it interesting.

JSF: And keeps it relevant. Every good book wants to express more or less the same thing. Every book is addressing, at least, these major themes of family, mortality, sexuality, and things like that. The problem is that these things have been expressed or we have attempted to express them for so long that the words start to become dead. And the stories start to become dead. Just in the interest of saying these things in the most simple way that you possibly can, you sometimes have to take a very unusual circuitous route. An expression like "I love you" has virtually no meaning anymore. Everyone has heard it. Probably from a number of people. How can you then express it with any meaning? Because you want the truth of it to come across. The answer is you have to find new ways to say it. Maybe you still use the three words but you do them in a different place. Or a different inflection or you are constantly trying to express to the person you are saying it to, why it means something. Books are the same things.