On a Friday afternoon in West Los Angeles, the Wildwood School is abuzz. The excitement, though, is not about the upcoming weekend but rather a small, thin figure who stands behind a podium in the school's auditorium, waiting for it to fill.
This is Jonathan Safran Foer, who three years ago, at 25, exploded onto the literary scene like a supernova with "Everything Is Illuminated," a debut novel about a young man's phantasmagoric journey to Eastern Europe in search of the family history he never knew. Now, Foer is back with a follow-up, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," which also deals with the intersection of family and history, this time in the shadow of the World Trade Center's fall.
As the author waits, high school kids pack rows of chairs or sprawl across a terrace of bleachers like human moss. Foer, for his part, looks slightly lost in a zippered sweatshirt, jeans and worn brown shoes. He doesn't seem much older than the students, with a light crust of stubble, eyes wide behind square-cut glasses. This is the cliche about Foer -- that he's an innocent, a boy genius, a savant. Such an image is encouraged by his fiction, especially "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," which is narrated by a precocious 9-year-old named Oskar Schell.
There's a sense that Oskar is a stand-in for the author, a kind of literary inner child. It's an idea Foer shrugs off, saying, "The further I get from my own voice, the more it feels like I'm telling the truth."
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He's no kid
Any lingering questions about his childlike nature dissipate the instant his presentation starts. From the outset, he is funny and engaging, while remaining utterly in control. As the students listen, he tells a few stories, then reads the opening of his new book before taking questions from the floor. When one kid asks if he "hung out" with 9-year-olds for research, Foer cracks, "I spent three months at the Neverland Ranch."
His enthusiasm is striking, not least because it's been a long day; he arrived in L.A. at 6:45 on this morning and has already toured the school and eaten lunch with a group of 11th-graders. This is important, he says, "because with high school students, often I'm the first author who has ever talked to them, and that personal connection is going to mean something in terms of making literature direct and real." As if to illustrate the point, he recalls a high school teacher of his own, who, for a unit on "The Odyssey," brought in a bow and arrow, which a student accidentally shot off. "I remember thinking," Foer jokes, "literature is now alive."
