Jonathan Safran Foer Sucks

Posted at 2:12 PM Nov 21, 2008

By Andy Beckerman

Jonathan Safran Foer? More like “Jonathan Safran Boer”! Right?! Ugh. Alright, try this one on for size: What’s a mohel’s favorite routinely postmodern author? Jonathan Safran Foerskin! No? How about this then: What do they yell out on a golf course when the author of Everything Is Illuminated walks by? “Hey asshole, move your fucking nerd face out of the way. We’re trying to golf. Oh, you write novels? You sold the rights to one? Who gives a shit? I’m the big cheese of a multi-million dollar corporation. Now scram, you dumb dora, before I box your ears.”

Now, the question you all might be asking yourselves is: Where did you go wrong in your lives to end up so far from the people you wanted to be, your dreams buried alive in an unmarked grave beneath a picnic table, slowly suffocating? That question I cannot answer, but another question that’s rattling around in your ennui-laden brains is: Why bother attacking Johnny Foer? What’d he ever do to you?

Well, for one, he gave my dad a busted lip in a bar fight. Dear old, smelly, drunken, decrepit, whinging, smelly, stinky, smelly pops had that one coming though, so I can’t really hold Foerier Transform accountable. OK, that's not entirely true. My father's never even stepped foot inside a bar. However, I can hold him accountable for his rote writing. And also, that movie of his one book with Frodo in it. Or was it with Spider-Man? I get those two actors jumbled up in my brain-part sometimes.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once wrote this in a short piece: “…[T]he pretense of being a writer…without being [one] or knowing anything about [it]; when one knows the ‘tune of culture’ but not the words, when one only knows how to mimic the gestures of the great writer, and even, for a while, make terror reign in the world of letters.” Is this not our friend Foer? The innovations in his prose not borne out of his own existence, but rather inherited from a generation of writers that came before him. To take the guise of postmodernism and apply it as if by habit rather than necessity? Is this not him?

And if this is so, does Foer, as the face of the 30-something Noo Yawk literati, not transcend his earthly limits and become a symbol? A trace, an idealized emblem of his entire generation that muddles through their works with the inspiration of a child mirroring his smelly dad without knowing the meaning behind that act? Why did you never love me, pops?