Interview Roundup: Fear, the Great Mind-Killer

Everybody with a bookblog seems to have an opinion about the Jonathan Safran Foer profile in the Sunday Times magazine: Galleycat dubbed it "Worst Profile Ever" before summarizing other reactions, while Tom Scocca pokes fun in today's New York Observer, which doesn't allow the non-paying public to view its archives, so we're lucky Gawker saved the funny bits. Me, I kinda liked the article--I certainly found Deborah Solomon more pleasant to read when freed from the relentless personality dueling of her weekly Q&As, and sure, Foer comes off as annoyingly precocious in spots, but if I could have an office where I didn't write, I'd probably do it, too. (Actually, I suppose I can, since I use a laptop with WiFi. So why don't I?) And I found this quote awfully meaningful:

"As a writer, I am trying to express those things that are most scary to me, because I am alone with them. Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances."

(Plus, it occurred to me later, plenty of great profiles are about the "romance" that develops between reporter and subject. How many of these people, perhaps already predisposed to slamming Solomon and/or Foer, would be knocking Joseph Mitchell for his infatuation with Joe Gould, or Joe Gould for pestering Mitchell all the time?)

Meanwhile, in the pages of New York, Boris Kachka checks in with Francine Prose, whose latest novel takes on "the sentimentality of the 'Holocaust industry,' the egotism of professional humanitarians, and the spotty morality of a victim-besotted media that edits out all ambiguity." But, she advises, she's not a satirist: "I like the characters, and I want the best for them. They're all trying to be good in that way that people in nineteenth-century novels were trying to be good. On the other hand, they live in our culture, in our city. And everybody is just scamming everybody else a mile a minute." Of course, to me, well-known for my love of Dawn Powell, that's a way to write good satire, but whatever other people want to call their stories is fine by me.

Bruce Wallace's LAT interview with Haruki Murakami (who kept popping up in Beatrix the first few weeks, as reviews of Kafka on the Shore poured in) begins by trying to loosely connect the disasters in his fiction to the real-life St. Stephen's Day tsunami. I don't know that it entirely works, but it's certainly true that "Murakami has created a canon from the metaphors offered by giant waves and wars, terrorist gases and earthquakes." One interesting tidbit in the cultural background Wallace builds up to contextualize Murakami's position in modern Japan: the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, is "a novelist who became a popular politician with his knack for pushing nationalist buttons." (His fiction doesn't seem to have made it over into English, but Powell's has used copies of his 1991 book The Japan That Can Say No.)