Jonathan Safran Foer is a strict vegetarian, but his most recent book, "Eating Animals," is not a screed against meat. It is, rather, an indictment of the corrupt, large-scale factory farming that dominates the American meat market. A journalistic work with a novelistic feel, the book is the result of three years investigating the U.S. meat industry, and it weaves together animal activist and farmer interviews with statistical research and even memoir to provide a sweeping account of Big Beef and its social, economical and environmental impact. Descriptions of animals suffering on the "kill floor" are enough to incite squirms from even non-animal lovers, but cruelty is not Foer's only grievance: There are health concerns and devastating environmental damage at issue as well.
"Eating Animals" may be Foer's first big swing at nonfiction, but primary themes hearken back to Foer's two critically polarizing novels, "Everything Is Illuminated" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." Family folklore and ideas about the complexity of memory permeate each; "Eating Animals" begins with a section titled "Storytelling," about Foer's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor (and passionate carnivore). "The story of her relationship with food," he writes, "holds all of the other stories that could be told about her."
The book is not without controversy, of course. Food politics gets at the very heart of what it means to be American -- alas, human -- and the subject of how and if we eat meat stirs up intense feeling. Last week, Natalie Portman kicked up a tiny tempest when she wrote about "Eating Animals" in a column on Huffington Post, championing Foer's argument but adding her own painfully tone-deaf riff about rape. (The controversy took place after the Salon interview but when I reached him afterward via e-mail, Foer had this to say about Portman's column: "It was such a thoughtful and generous piece of writing. I felt gratefulness more than anything else.")
I met with Foer recently in a coffee shop near his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he spoke about what's wrong with PETA, how he finally went so local he ditched Amazon -- and what Americans can do to help put an end to the evils of factory farms.
This is not a straightforward case for vegetarianism. What is this book making a case for?
It's an explanation of my own vegetarianism, and it's a straightforward case for caring and thinking, and for the ideas that matter. These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. An enormous and very destructive force -- historically, it's unprecedented how destructive our farm system is -- has taken over America and is starting to take over the world. And unlike so many other horrible systems, this one doesn't require electing a new government or raising billions of dollars or fighting a war. It can be dismantled just by people making different choices. I think there are a lot of different choices people can make that will lead to dismantling the system. It's not like everybody has to go vegetarian. There are plenty of people who feel like, for whatever reason, they just can't stop eating meat, but if they bought meat at the green market, from farmers they know by name, that's as effective a rebuttal.
What if you live in a city and you don't live near a farm? I'm sure there are tons of people like that in New York. What's your suggestion for them?
Well, in New York everybody is near a green market. Everybody is near a source of family-farmed meat. In fact, cities are frankly the best place to be in terms of that. But you ask a good question because there are a lot of times when you don't have a choice. Like, in a restaurant, you never have a choice, with the exception of -- maybe there's 10 restaurants in New York City. In restaurants people are often faced with this problem, like, "Well, I'm either going to have to leave my values at the door and just eat this stuff, or eat vegetarian." Those are the only two choices we have. And then people think, what does it mean to care about something if you don't act on that care? Even if it makes things less convenient, even if it makes your meal less enjoyable -- which is totally possible. But we make decisions all the time guided by our values that make our lives less convenient and less enjoyable. We do them because they're things that matter more to us than a momentary pleasure, momentary comfort. I don't know why food would be an exception.
How has writing and researching this book changed the way you and your family eat?
We were vegetarians before, and we continue to be, and we're raising our kids vegetarian. One thing that has interested me about my response to this whole project is that it's made me care about other things. I mean, caring is contagious. It's very hard to care about one thing and not care about its neighbor. For example, I was not a huge advocate of buying things locally, not food but like books -- anything. I would buy books on Amazon all the time. But for whatever reason, the subject does not have anything to do with that, but the process of writing it made me much more concerned about buying things locally, supporting my neighborhood stores, it mattering that I know the person who's selling me something. That's something that's great about food is that so much intersects there. Tolstoy famously said, "If there were no more slaughterhouses there would be no more battlefields." I don't think that's true, and I don't think all battlefields are bad, but what is true is that when you start to care about food and think about the animals and how we raise them, it encourages you to have lots of other thoughts.
This is your first nonfiction book.
Well, it's my first and my last. I don't think I'll ever do it again. It's not something that interests me. I felt a little bit like dressing up for Halloween. Although, my interests at the end of the day were never really journalistic and it always did feel personal. And the themes that this book falls back on are the themes that my novels fall back on, like, how are lessons transmitted through generations and families, how do our decisions matter, how do they influence others? So, part of what inspired me to write about this was not that I cared about it so much but that nobody was writing about it. There are a lot of things I care about, but great people are writing about them. And there hasn't really been a mainstream book about meat, despite the fact that it's everything. I mean, if it isn't the biggest, most important issue in our country right now, it's up there.
Did any specific authors or works influence your book?
Many. Of course, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Peter Singer. I mean if any of them had written the thing that I wanted to read, I wouldn't have had to write my book. See, Pollan is wonderful, but he doesn't really get into meat too deeply; he sort of goes up to the edge of it and then stops. The same with Schlosser. Peter Singer writes about meat very directly, but in a way that I feel doesn't include enough of the messiness of being a person in the world and having cravings, having personal history, having family. Reason has something to do with our food decisions, but not a lot. Most food decisions are made out of emotions or psychology or impulse, and so I wanted a book that included those things.
What were some of the most surprising or disturbing things you found in your research?
The most disturbing thing is not any instance, but the rule. It's a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people's exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they're the rule. So an animal running and getting beaten up or running around with its neck slit open: That is the exception, even on the worst farms it's still the exception. But the rule that happens even on the best factory farms is animals are genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, animals that never see the sun and never touch the earth, animals whose cages are never cleaned. These things are not as shocking and don't work as well in a video, but they're something to be concerned with much more because they're happening to billions and billions of animals every year. It's the way that the notion that an animal is a thing has been systematized and it's part of the business model and that everyone thinks this way. That was the most surprising thing.
You also talk about your dog George, and consider why people will eat farm animals but not dogs. Can you elaborate on that?
The book in the beginning sort of presents two approaches. One is philosophical -- is it right or isn't it right? Why do we do this at all? And the other is practical. I side with the practical. I mean, the book moves in the direction of the practical because in a way the philosophical questions are irrelevant. "Is it right to eat an animal, is it not right to eat an animal?" That's how most people talk about vegetarianism. But to me it doesn't even matter. The truth is I actually don't know what I think about that question. What I know is that it's wrong to do it the way that we're doing it. And we could sit here and argue about a perfect farm where animals are treated perfectly and slaughtered perfectly and whether that's right. But if it exists at all it exists in a place that is impossible for us to find on any regular basis. So what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers. And that's bad; I mean, those things are bad. And that conversation preempts the philosophical conversation.
Your grandmother was a huge influence on your concept of food, and you also say she's an unapologetic meat eater. How did she react to the book?
I don't think she's read it yet. I think she will agree with a lot of what I said. I don't think she's going to change. I think she's past changing. But I've had pretty frank conversations with her about what's right and what's wrong, and she'll agree -- as will everybody, by the way. There's not a reader of this interview who will say it's right to make animals suffer unnecessarily. So then it becomes a question of what is suffering to different people and what is necessary to different people. And people can have all kinds of different, very respectable differences of opinion on this question, but I've spoken to my grandmother about why this might be wrong and she doesn't disagree. It's sad. She said in a very upfront way, "I don't think about it, I'm not going to think about it." For someone like my grandmother -- frankly, for a lot of people -- I don't really push it. I think for people who are still forming their habits, like high school students or college students, that kind of willed ignorance is lame at best and something much worse because they're most able to change. They're the ones who are ultimately going to have to foot the bill of factory farming and are more required to do the uncomfortable thinking that a 90-year-old doesn't.
Can you talk a little bit about America's obsession with food?
There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. Factory farming supplies a demand for cheap meat. That's it. It doesn't taste good, it's not healthy for us. The only good thing about it is that it's cheap. But the thing is that it's not cheap. It's cheap at the cash register, and it's sold as cheap -- that's the defense for factory farming, "Look, we're making affordable food for normal people and all other arguments are elitist." But in fact factory farming is like the ultimate elitism because it's the most expensive food ever produced in the history of mankind. We pay very little at the cash register, but we pay and our kids are going to pay for the environmental toll, obviously the animals are paying, rural communities are paying. And for what? So that corporations can prosper. The huge agribusiness -- companies make hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, not in the name of feeding the world, but in the name of making something that's so cheap that people become literally addicted to it.
Aside from getting green meat and eating locally, what are things that both vegetarians and meat eaters can do to help the transition from factory farms to something better?
First of all, they just have to say no to factory farms always. Not sometimes, not most of the time, but always, which means eating vegetarian a lot of the time. I think this issue is frankly more important than our conversation about the environment, because it is the No. 1 cause of global warning. The World Watch just released a report that showed that they thought animal agriculture was responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, but it turns out it's 51 percent. So to talk about the environment and not talk about this is not to talk about the environment. This conversation has to be totally mainstreamed. There has to be a consensus behind it that factory farming is bad and we're not going to support it and we're done with it. And it has to be unacceptable either to pretend these problems don't exist or not to actively engage with them. I'm not saying everybody has to reach the same conclusions, but they do have to agree on the common enemy.
Liev Schreiber, 37, is among the most respected actors of his generation, with major roles on stage (he recently finished a run as Richard Roma in the Broadway production of "Glengarry Glen Ross," for which he won a Tony) and screen, where he's had savvy supporting roles in big movies such as "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004) and the "Scream" series, and memorable parts in a body of highly regarded smaller films, including "A Walk on the Moon" (1999), "Walking and Talking" (1996), "The Daytrippers" (1996) and "Party Girl" (1995).
But it wasn't until he became a director, Schreiber says, that he started caring about the critics. When I met to talk with him recently in New York, he noticed a local paper as we sat down.
"Oh, it's a review," he said darkly, and tossed it out of the way. "I never took things personally as an actor," he said. "I never took things personally at all, not until I started doing this."
"This" is his directorial debut, the film version of Jonathan Safran Foer's bestselling novel "Everything Is Illuminated." Schreiber's adaptation, which opened Friday, involves an American kid named Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood) who travels to the Ukraine to find his grandfather's hometown and the mysterious woman who saved his life during the Holocaust. A local, Alex (Eugene Hutz), and his own grandfather (Boris Leskin) shuttle Jonathan around the country, acting, respectively, as translator and driver. For the record, their dog (or, in the movie's parlance, their "officious seeing-eye bitch") is named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. Part of the charm of both the novel and the film is Alex's bizarre English: "I am dubbed Alex," he says, and that his grandfather found Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. at "the home for forgetful dogs."
But beneath the story's giddy humor is a serious meditation on culture, identity and memory -- issues that, Schreiber says, he has personally been grappling with.
How did you end up choosing to adapt "Everything Is Illuminated" for your directorial debut?
My grandfather is an Eastern European immigrant from the Ukraine, and I was very, very close to him, and when he died in 1993 I started to write a lot about him, and eventually I began to develop the idea for a screenplay that was a story about an American who goes back to the Ukraine to find out about his heritage. And the structure of it was a road movie about a guy who gets involved with the mob, falls in love with a prostitute, and they rip him off and he ends up penniless, and that ultimately is what he decides it is to be Ukrainian. So I'm working on this piece and everything is going fine, and ... [the New Yorker publishes] a short story submitted by a guy named Jonathan Safran Foer, and it was called "The Very Rigid Search." It was a story about a road trip of a young man who goes to the Ukraine to find out about his heritage, and particularly his grandfather. And I was kind of blown away by the similarities between our two stories, and I guess what I was most impressed with, which was not as present in my own work, was his definitively Eastern European Jewish survivor sort of humor.
I met [Foer] and we talked about our grandfathers and talked about short-term memory and Eastern European culture ... and by the end of the night he agreed to let me adapt his short story, on the condition that I read the novel. He gave me the galleys that night, because the novel was unpublished. And I read the novel and was completely blown away by the quality of his writing, for such a young man to write with such maturity and humor and pathos. And basically it had the structure in place of a road movie, so it was just really a question of mining the novel I had read for the material I felt would be evocative in my structure. I finished the script a month and a half later; a week after that the book was published, and I opened the New York Times and there it was on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. And I realized that I was in for a ride.
So as the novel became clearly popular, did it make things easier for you in terms of getting the film off the ground?
It was a double-edged sword. On one side it made it very easy to set up a deal. Here I was the accidental owner of a very valuable property. And the novel just seemed to grow and grow and grow in popularity. And that made my job easier in terms of setting up the deal. Of course it increased exponentially the pressure and anxiety I felt about adapting a novel that was so beloved by the public.
But also people do have very strong feelings about that book and about Foer himself -- they either love him or they hate him.
Yes. I think the biggest anxiety for me in making this film -- and it only got exponentially worse as the book became more and more popular and more people read it -- but probably the biggest anxiety was the sense of responsibility I felt not only to Jonathan as a writer, but to my own family, because it's a story that's personally evocative for them, and of course for Jonathan's family as well. And that was crippling sometimes, that sense of responsibility and anxiety.
That's the nature of film: On one side of the coin it's a pragmatic, brutal kind of physical endeavor -- make the day, finish on time, do it with the money you've been allotted. And that's the reality of your day -- shoot the scene, pray it doesn't rain, hope that everything works, try to create an environment in which the actors can do their thing and still deliver the visual text that you're trying to deliver. You want to be almost emotionless to fulfill that, because it really is like a triathlon. And the more emotion and the more anxiety you feel the harder it is to get through the day. And when something doesn't go right, or if you think you haven't got it, to get caught up in the emotionality of "Christ, what's this going to do to my family? What's this going to do to Jonathan's family? What's this going to do to Jonathan and me?" -- that slows you down, stops you, and you just need to keep moving forward, and that was the hardest part.
My emotional responses to things as an actor are very useful, but as a director sometimes not so much.
Did you consult with Foer when writing the screenplay, or did he pretty much just leave you to it?
He read every draft of the script that I wrote. I wanted him to write it with me. I love his writing, he has a truly unique sense of humor, and I had some of that from my own grandfather and it was built into me somewhere, but I just knew there were riches in Jonathan's brain that I wanted. But he felt pretty adamant that he had done his part, which was the book. But we spent an awful lot of time, before I started, talking about what kind of movies we liked, what kind of things we liked, and we talked about that cultural sense of humor and what it meant in a deeper context. He had been in Europe working on his second novel, and I had been living in Europe as an actor, and we talked a lot about stereotypes and clichés of the American character that we felt were hurtful to us, and part of what we both liked about "Illuminated" so much is that it offered up a different kind of American character, a vulnerable American character, someone who has flaws, someone who was open, someone who was awkward, and more importantly than anything, someone who was looking for his own heritage beyond the borders of his own country.
It seems like it's much harder to win respect for a movie that's based on a book, because everyone's going to compare it to the book, and usually unfavorably. But in this case, I felt like the actors really looked and sounded like my idea of them in the novel. I've always thought of Jonathan Safran Foer as somewhat Elijah Wood-ish.
Good, I hope you write that, because I'm very proud of Elijah, and Elijah took a great risk to play this part. It's a hard part because it's such a stoic character, and it's so emotionless, at least at the beginning of the film. And part of the idea was to have somebody who was in a sense an empty vessel that would be filled with information over the course of the journey and then begin to emote. The characters are so vivid, and that's Jonathan's talent.
... Part of what makes a good film to me is when I'm transported to some place, and it seems like we had a really unique opportunity here with the Ukraine to take our audience to a place that was unfamiliar to them, which is in a sense what we were doing through our central character, Jonathan. I felt that it was very important that the culture and the characters and the location be as authentic as possible. That and the use of the Russian language -- as difficult an idea as that is to deal with, because nobody seems to like subtitled movies these days -- it was very important that we were being immersed in a foreign environment and that it was just as strange for us as it was for Jonathan. And to that end, there was no way I was going to use American actors who had to learn Ukrainian or Ukrainian dialects to play these characters.
The movie has nothing if not a deep sense of culture; it's about a cultural clash between East and West. I was trying to make the film feel more like an Eastern European film than an American film so that we could come down on their side, perhaps -- start on our side, and come down on their side. It's that kind of compassion that I think is evocative of the novel; you get a sense of a really broad sense of humor but at the same time you identify with them as not being really that different from us. And I think that was a real gift from Jonathan as a writer.
I wonder if your experience making remakes -- "Hamlet" (2000), "Glengarry Glen Ross," "The Manchurian Candidate" -- may have come in handy with adapting a written work to film. I mean, in both cases, you're dealing with work that has had a previous life -- with the films and plays, other actors who have played these roles, and with the book, there's the reader's idea of what the characters look like.
Ah, you jumped on the remake thing, didn't you?
Yes, I did!
Nice one! You know, approaching a story that's been done before, you don't do anything differently. The reality is that I don't know a story that hasn't been told before. How famous they are, how much people identify with them, that's something else. But I think that's the point of good stories, they have a way of repeating themselves. And if you are sincere about it, if you are personal, in other words you include yourself in the process, chances are other people will feel included because other people identify with you a lot more than you think they do. It's only when you try to be them, when you try to second-guess how they feel, that you risk missing the mark more often.
Sure, but you still have to make these things your own, and you do seem to have a large amount of experience with that. So how do you specifically do it?
Well, for instance, I have a pathological memory problem, I always have, and I've been to doctors about it because it got really serious. At one point I was upstate at my house with my brother, and the telephone rang, and I had no idea where I was. I didn't even recognize my brother. I walked in the house, and by the time I picked up the phone I knew where I was. So I started going to doctors, I had CAT scans and MRIs, they checked me from head to foot and said there's nothing wrong with you. And it had happened to me months before when I was in high school, when I was playing football, and I thought it was a concussion. After a play I was lying in the field and thinking, where the hell am I? And after about 30 seconds I was back. They said to me, maybe you should go to therapy. So I went and after talking to this therapist for a period of three months, basically I came away with the conclusion that I just have a terrible memory! I don't remember my childhood, I don't remember a lot of things, I have flashes of things, but talking to my friends I've found that this isn't so uncommon.
So for me -- now I'm trying to get back to your question -- for me, if you believe a human being is a collage or a collection of memory and history, if that's part of what makes up our personalities and who we are, then you start to freak out a little bit that if you don't have a memory then you get a bit of an identity crisis. Which is OK if you're an actor, because every month you get a new script. But when my grandfather died in 1993, I started to panic a little bit that I was losing things that were important to me. And I remember when I turned 34 I looked in the mirror and thought my hair was thinning, and you know how you get your hair from your mother's father?
Yes.
So I was thinking, was my grandfather bald when he died? And it flipped me out that the person I was closest to in the world, I couldn't remember if he had a bald spot when he died. And that was the beginning of the process of me writing about him, and that was the beginning of me being very concerned about my memory, and I started to collect things that would remind me of places and people. When I started to work on the movie, I had my assistant take Polaroids of the entire crew, and I would write their names on them because literally in a day I would forget everyone's name. So that was an element I gave to Jonathan, collecting things and putting them in Ziplock bags and creating this collage of artificial memory. And I think what moved me so much about the novel was that Jonathan was proposing, I felt, or what I interpreted because my big issue is memory, that a past lovingly imagined is as valuable as a past accurately recalled. And that was how I, as a writer and as a director, put my thing in the film.
In terms of acting, an example for me would be Eugene [Hutz], who I think is a fantastic natural performer, incredibly charismatic -- but Eugene's the frontman to a gypsy punk band, Gogol Bordello, and Eugene's used to playing to 800 to 1,000 people, and his favorite actor is Charles Bronson. So Eugene, having never acted before in front of a camera, had all these ideas of what acting was, and the whole journey for me with Eugene was getting him to accept that he was Alex, and he didn't need to play Alex, he didn't need to go to the Yale School of Drama, all he needed to do was to trust who he was and how he would react to things. And then it was just a question of scale -- you're not playing to 800 people, you're playing to a camera that is 6 inches in front of your face. And once we had that he started to blossom. It was the same thing for every character. Your personal story, which no one knows, is what people are going to identify with. That emotion comes through on camera.
The humor in the book version of "Illuminated" is largely in the language -- the goings-on are intensely serious, but then you have this comic voice narrating them. That type of voice-driven story usually adapts terribly to screen, but I liked that you retained lot of the humor by not only having Alex's voice-over narration, but also by transferring much of the quirkiness into the visual language of the film. For example, in contrasting the old and new Ukraine, you have a scene in which we see two old people sitting on a bench, but then the camera pans up and in the park behind them are all these young skateboarders. I'm sure there must have been directors who influenced those scenes.
I'm glad you noticed that. That was a big deal to me. I drew a lot of [those scenes] from the book, but I also drew a lot of them from my own investigations about culture. I started thinking about making this movie in the fall of 2001, and one of the things I was thinking of was that right after September 11, there was this window of compassion that I felt in this country. Remember when all the people were out on the Westside Highway with the signs? For the first time I felt there was an American identity, a sense of national pride. And I thought, well shit, what does it mean to be American? And because I was working on "Illuminated" I was thinking that, in a sense, this is a country of grandchildren. Then this flag waving started to happen that I thought interrupted this sense of national pride that I was feeling.
I was very happy that we were working on Jonathan's book because I felt like here was a way that we could embrace culture and in a way that would be bridging cultural gaps and reaching out internationally. So for me it was important to find ways to illustrate that culture effectively. And I guess the models I had in Eastern Europe, because I had never been there before were [Nikita] Mikhalkov, Milos Forman, [Emir] Kusturica, and there was a visual text that I had been learning since I was a kid -- what is culture visually to you? You can find examples and metaphors in the buildings, in the landscapes, in the color of people's teeth, in their fingernails, in their hair. What was so beautiful about Jonathan's book to me was here was a young person who was interested in old people, which is so rare nowadays. So for me that dialectic of old and new was really powerful, seeing old people and new people together, and old buildings and new buildings. The regrowth. I love that set we found in an old cement factory, where out of the rubble was growing grass and trees, straight out of the building. It's those kinds of things that articulate a sense of regrowth and rebirth.
In the books-vs.-movies debate, we all have strong feelings about how well (or how poorly) the novels we care about translate to the screen. But what about the novels we don't have any feelings for at all -- the books that we attempted, in good faith, to trudge through because they'd been recommended by a friend or gotten good reviews?
Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated" was jubilantly celebrated when it was published in 2001, in reviews laden with words like rich and deeply moving. Apparently, being deeply moved is the reward for wading through pages of the sort of prose whose wordy digressions and repetitiveness are part of its style (and part of its challenge).
I attempted to read "Everything Is Illuminated," very much wanting to get to the stuff that had so deeply moved so many people. I wanted to catch that mechanical rabbit. It eluded my grasp, but at least Liev Schreiber, in his film version of the book, ultimately -- after a number of false starts and hiccups -- manages to grab it by the ears.
Which is to say that I still think the book is a stinker. But the material apparently means a great deal to Schreiber, who makes his directorial debut here. Through the first two-thirds of the picture, Schreiber is too respectful of the self-conscious self-absorption of Foer's style. But by the last third, he's able to move past it and on to something more vital. "Everything Is Illuminated" is about, among other things, the human need to have some sense of who our forebears were, and to make some connection between who they were and who we are. It's simpler to write that in words than it is to put it on-screen in a way that isn't trite or tired, and unfortunately, "Everything Is Illuminated" snaps to life too late. But at least there is life in it. It doesn't hold together as a piece of filmmaking, but there's no doubt it comes from somewhere close to Schreiber's heart.
Instead of attempting to adapt Foer's sprawl of a novel in its entirety, Schreiber (who also wrote the screenplay) focuses on the portion that appeared in the New Yorker before the book's publication. He cooks the story down to its essence, with a minimum of frills and curlicues. Elijah Wood plays a character who goes by the name Jonathan Safran Foer, an eccentric Brooklynite who collects bits and pieces of his family's past -- everything from photographs to scraps of cloth -- which he places in individual baggies and tacks to his wall. At first we don't know for sure why he has cultivated this curious habit, but we can guess: He's afraid, as he reveals later in the movie, that he'll "forget."
Jonathan has become obsessed with something he has just learned about his late grandfather, Safran: A mysterious woman helped Safran escape Ukraine in the early 1940s -- if it weren't for her, he'd have been killed when the Nazis wiped out the small town he lived in. So Jonathan, intent on finding the woman, books a trip to Odessa with a two-bit outfit called Heritage Touring, which specializes in putting together trips for rich American Jews intent on unlocking secrets of their families' past. Upon his arrival in Odessa -- wearing a stiff dark suit, brown shoes and enormous spectacles -- Jonathan is met by the young man who is to be his translator and guide, Alex (Eugene Hutz), a young Eastern European would-be hipster who favors Adidas track pants, gold chains and Kangol caps, who confesses to being very fond of "the Negro" (especially Michael Jackson), and who mangles the English language freely and often. Sample sentence: "I want you to forgive my speaking of English, Johnfen. I am not so premium with it."
Along for the ride is Alex's grandfather (Boris Leskin), who claims to be blind but who's nonetheless entrusted with driving Alex and Jonathan from Odessa to the obscure location Jonathan is looking for. (Also along for the ride is Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., an alert, high-strung black and white dog who wears a white T-shirt with leg holes cut into it, proclaiming her "Officious Seeing Eye Bitch.")
If that all sounds rather unbearably whimsical, it is -- and Schreiber leaves the whimsy faucet dripping for far too long. Much of "Everything Is Illuminated" is tediously coy. Schreiber overuses some particularly annoying Eastern European oompah music to signal us to the allegedly hilarious absurdity of certain narrative twists, not trusting us to find the humor in this story without musical signposts. He chooses his details carefully but too obsessively: Not once but twice he shows us an old woman's false teeth soaking in a glass of water, in case we didn't happen to lock onto the poignancy of the image the first time.
But just when you're about to give up on the notion of having anything illuminated, Schreiber finds some momentum in the story and -- finally -- a few crucial elements click into place. Certain characters reveal dark secrets, and Jonathan meets a woman who honors the lives of the townspeople who were so brutally slaughtered. In some ways, she's his perfect counterpart: She needs to keep the past breathing, just as Jonathan does. She's a symbolic character, but, unlike Jonathan, at least she's not a construct.
In the end, it's easier to feel something for every character here except Jonathan: He's a dully opaque figure, the sort whose desperate efforts to make us think he's trying to fade into the woodwork are actually a kind of self-aggrandizement. Wood doesn't know how to play Jonathan. He shows shreds of off-guard charm in a few scenes, but mostly, he's impenetrable. (Maybe he didn't like the book, either.) And maybe the last portion of the movie works better than the rest because Jonathan's quest is no longer the focal point: We recognize, even if he doesn't, that other people's lives matter more than our obsessions do.
In the end, that openheartedness is what Schreiber seems to want us to take away from "Everything Is Illuminated." He read something that moved him and wanted to pass those feelings along to us. How successful he is at that, as a first-time filmmaker, perhaps matters less than the fact that he had the impulse at all. That impulse isn't nothing. When he finds good material, it might really turn out to be something.
I have to admit that I haven't been too keen to read any of the half-dozen or so 9/11 novels marking this season's fiction lists. That date still feels too close, too fresh in the memory to necessitate a literary reminder, too difficult to render in fiction without the kind of overearnestness that ultimately estranges the reader from the emotional center of the event being described. That's why I was surprised to find that Jonathan Safran Foer's touching account of the grief and disorientation of 9/11's aftermath is also strangely healing.
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is the story of Oskar Schell, an eccentric 9-year-old, the kind of child that adults adore and kids love to pick on. Oskar -- like most of the characters in this book -- isn't exactly what you would call a realistic invention, but he is nonetheless an endearing and funny narrator. A sort of male, science-geek version of Eloise, he's precocious and independent, coming and going from his Upper West Side home without much adult interference. He dresses exclusively in white, plays the tambourine as he walks down the street, makes jewelry, obsessively searches the Internet and proclaims his favorite book to be "A Brief History of Time."
Oskar's problems begin when his father dies in the attacks on Sept. 11, after which he becomes a tortured insomniac, or, as he puts it, he's "in heavy boots." He obsessively invents contraptions to keep people safe, or at the very least, to ease loneliness ("air bags for skyscrapers, solar-powered limousines that never had to stop moving, a frictionless, perpetual yo-yo"). He also bruises himself on purpose, and he keeps a scrapbook titled "Stuff That Happened to Me," into which he pastes things he finds on the Internet, like pictures of decapitated soldiers and shark attacks, "even though I knew they would only hurt me, because I couldn't help it."
The real reason for Oskar's self-punishment is the secret he's keeping from his family: the five phone messages from his father, trapped in the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the north tower, which Oskar found and hid when he came home from school on "the worst day." "The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into," he says, and that hole, coupled with the discovery of a mysterious key in his father's closet, sets him on a journey throughout the city to find the lock it belongs to and, he believes, continued closeness with his father. And so he spends his weekends combing the city for people named Black -- the only clue he has -- on a mission he's decided to keep secret, separating him even further from the rest of his family.
What Oskar doesn't know is that he's not the only one with an emotional hole. His mother struggles through her grief with a male friend, whom Oskar, in typical 9-year-old fashion, highly resents as a father replacement. His grandfather, Thomas Schell, remains tortured by the death of his first fiancie, Anna, and their unborn child, in the bombing of Dresden, a loss that has rendered him mute and dependent on a daybook and the "Yes" and "No" tattoos on his hands to communicate. And Oskar's grandmother ruminates over the destruction of her entire family, including that same Anna, who was her sister, and the knowledge that her marriage is based solely on this shared loss.
Oskar's grandparents' narratives alternate with his; as Thomas writes letters to Oskar's father, whom he abandoned before birth and to whom he obsessively writes unsent explanations, Grandma (who remains unnamed) writes her story to her beloved Oskar. Both grandparents are trying desperately to explain, more to themselves than to their progeny, it seems, the work of creating a normal life after tragedy -- something that Thomas, at least, failed miserably to do. As Oskar himself pushes away his family, "zipping up the sleeping bag of myself," he mimics his grandfather's flight; the central tension of the novel lies in the hope, for the sake of this odd child, that in the end he'll choose love over fear.
Ultimately, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is a story of that choice, thrust upon the characters by inconsolable grief. The catch of the title is that it is tragedy that is loud and close, but the people who can share and relieve grief are all too quiet and far away. It's an intimate story tightly centered upon one family, but one that links itself to tragedies past and to other personal losses through Oskar's surreal encounters with the city's residents named Black. It's in these meetings, when Oskar reforges the bond of shared experience, that the novel becomes remarkably consoling.
Foer has chosen an experimental form for this second novel, one that includes pictures and blank pages, one page covered with type so closely knitted together that it's impossible to read, a couple more that are filled with just numbers. Some of these link parts of the narrative to others, like the sudden appearance of doorknobs in the midst of Thomas' pages, which only make sense once we know that he's pasted them into the daybooks in which he writes his letters to his son and his one-sentence communiquis with the rest of the world. Some suggest emotions that cannot be expressed in words; the only indication we have of the sense of abandonment Oskar's father feels from Thomas is the one letter he has, which is covered with red circles -- from the same pen, we know from Oskar, that his father used to mark up errors in the New York Times.
In many ways, "Extremely Loud" resembles Foer's first book, "Everything Is Illuminated": the multigenerational wrestling with cataclysm, the obsession with patrilineal history, the alternating narratives. But while "Everything Is Illuminated" was a wonderful debut novel, funny and touching, it was also awkward and clunky the way first attempts often are. A great novelist knows how to guide a reader through the emotional terrain of the story; Foer often lost control of that landscape. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is, by contrast, the result of a more mature and even pen. Even Foer's flashier tricks, rather than overwhelming the story, serve to heighten the emotionality. It seems clear at this point that Foer has successfully graduated from being a one-off wunderkind to an accomplished and graceful writer. What he has given us is not just a remarkably clever work, but the 9/11 story we need, even if we didn't know it.
Should celebrity be classified as a controlled substance? Consider first the available medical literature: rambling and confused statements, delusional behavior, outbursts of megalomania, and in the case of People magazine's Steven Cojocaru, unflattering shags -- all triggered by the sudden and confounding infusion of quasi-fame. The blazingly dysfunctional path of today's insta-celebrities is not something children should be exposed to or, come to think of it, most adults. Enough fooling around, then. Bring on the PSA campaign.
And for campaign spokesman, please consider James Frey, the rising author who has, in effect, done the thing he swore never to do: He has traded in one addiction for another. That is, he has written a ballsy, bone-deep memoir about coming off drugs -- titled "A Million Little Pieces" -- which he is now promoting with such hopped-up, synthetically fueled mania that reading his interviews becomes a form of retox.
"A Million Little Pieces" has all the hallmarks of a Publishing Event. An eye-grabbing cover: the Buñuellian image of a human hand sheathed in micro-pills. A movie-ready subject: the near-death spiral and phoenixlike rebirth of a rich suburban kid. (Boy, Interrupted.) A string of high-profile blurbers: Pat Conroy, Bret Easton Ellis, Gus Van Sant. And, most telling of all, a publicity Anschluss, engineered by Random House's genteel Nan Talese imprint.
The big noise began with a now-famous New York Observer interview, two full months before the book's release, in which the 33-year-old Frey wasted no time sawing off the legs of his rivals. "I don't give a fuck what Jonathan Safran whatever-his-name does or what David Foster Wallace does. I don't give a fuck what any of those people do. I don't hang out with them, I'm not friends with them, I'm not part of the literati." Don't even get him started on Dave Eggers. "A book that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation. Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody who says that. I don't give a fuck what they think about me. I'm going to try to write the best book of my generation and I'm going to try to be the best writer."
And that was just appetizers. Before he was done, Frey had revealed:
Somewhere on Heaven's savannah, Papa Hemingway was firing off Gatling-gun salutes. In subsequent interviews, Frey has struck a more chastened tone and has even exhibited some blunt decency, but any interviewer who sticks around long enough is bound to be rewarded with another round of chest butting.
"It's a new phenomenon that writers aren't willing to say, 'I want to be the fucking best!'" he told Entertainment Weekly. "For most of the 20th century, when people like me grew up wanting to be writers, people like Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer -- none of these people got into writing and didn't take it fucking seriously. They got into it saying, 'I'm going to write books that change people's lives. I'm going to write the best book of my generation. I'm going to be remembered as someone who changed the way people think and write and live.' Well, I don't have a problem saying I want to be the fucking best."
Shifting gears: "I don't sit at home and think, 'Okay, I'm going to make this person think this about me.' To a certain extent, I don't give a fuck what you think about me."
A writer who wants to be thought of as the fucking best but doesn't give a fuck what anyone thinks. Oh, the webs we authors weave when we leave the safety of the printed page. I happen to think "A Million Little Pieces" will be a top seller with or without the aggressive hyping -- as the most scalding account of addiction in recent memory, it deserves to be -- but not all publicity is good publicity, and if these take-no-prisoner interviews continue, the book in question may soon be dwarfed by the Other Story: James Frey's bombs bursting in air. He may become the latest cautionary example of how writers compromise themselves the moment they open their mouths.
Can any book live up to the expectations James Frey has created? Well, if this bullheaded, lionhearted book doesn't reach the level of masterpiece, it's not for lack of trying. Frey has devised a rolling, pulsing style that really moves -- an acquired taste, perhaps, but undeniably striking. It may not make him the world's best fucking author, but at least he can console himself with how far he has climbed in the world's estimation. A decade ago, he was, by his own admission, "an Alcoholic and a drug Addict and a Criminal." He had begun drinking while still a child. At 12, he was smoking pot. (It was the only drug he was able to give up: not strong enough.) At 15, he was selling drugs and liquor. At 18, he was blacking out every night, and at 21, he was throwing up, pissing and shitting blood. Booze, crack, pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP, glue: He did them all. And after skipping bail in three different states, he took a face-first tumble down a fire escape, broke his nose, gashed his face, knocked out four of his teeth -- and woke up on a plane. The party was over.
When the book opens, Frey is being shipped off by his parents to Minnesota's famous Hazelden drug and alcohol treatment facility. Prostrate and strung out he may be, but he's no pushover. From the onset, he breaks rules, rebels against clinic authorities and rejects the 12-step pieties propagated by his well-meaning counselors -- refuses, in effect, to follow the Recovery Arc. And so "A Million Little Pieces" ends up following an arc of its own. It's about a stubborn, prickly, fucked-up guy who, with the help of the Tao Te Ching and some appealingly unsavory rehab mates, finds his own road back to life. "There is no God," he declares, "and there is no such thing as a Higher Power. I will do it with me. Alone ... Every time I want to drink or do drugs, I'm going to make the decision not to do them. I'll keep making that decision until it's no longer a decision, but a way of life."
As Bette Midler once observed, when a cokehead says, "Let's go somewhere and talk," what he really means is, "Let's go somewhere and I'll talk." And that's essentially what "A Million Little Pieces" is: 382 pages of churning, self-mortifying, self-aggrandizing talk -- no indentations, no quotation marks -- nothing to stop the unspooling of consciousness.
"I open the door and I walk out. I make my way back to the Unit. Night has fallen and the Halls are dark. Overhead lights illuminate them. I hate the lights I want them gone. I wish the Halls were darker. I am craving the dark the darkest darkness the deep and horrible hole. I wish the Halls were fucking black. My mind is black my heart is black I wish the Halls were black. If I could, I would destroy the lights above me with a fucking bat. I would smash them to fucking pieces. I wish the Halls were black."
This is as good an example as any of Frey's style: the Germanically capitalized nouns, the steady drumbeat of baldly declarative sentences, the incantatory rhythms. Stretched to book length, of course, the baldness can turn portentous and the incantation can curdle into mere repetition. "A Million Little Pieces" is mannered, exasperating, far too long, stiff with masculine posturing, at times disingenuous. (How is the Tao Te Ching any less prescriptive or beholden to higher authority than the 12 steps?) And yet it's a fierce and honorable work that refuses to glamorize that author's addiction or his thorny personality:
"I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag full of mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can."
In this way, Frey earns his moments of awkward, hard-wrung pathos:
"The Gates are open and thirteen years of addiction, violence, Hell and their accompaniment are manifesting themselves in dense tears and heavy sobs and a shortness of breath and a profound sense of loss. The loss inhabits, fills and overwhelms me. It is the loss of a childhood of being a Teenager of normalcy of happiness of love of trust of reason of God of Family of friends of future of potential of dignity of humanity of sanity of myself of everything everything everything. I lost everything and I am lost reduced to a mass of mourning, sadness, grief, anguish and heartache. I am lost. I have lost. Everything. Everything."
They're not always pretty, these linguistic pileups, but coursing through every page is the author's palpable desire -- a desire that might effetely be called Dostoevskian -- to scrape down to the very marrow, to transcribe everything, everything about this particular experience.
The result is a book that makes other recovery memoirs look, well, a little pussy-ass -- a book about the body in all its horror. Spit, snot, urine, shit. The deadly shakes, wall-rattling screams. Skin gouging, hair tearing. Nails pulled off toes. A grueling, anesthesia-free round of dental surgery. And more vomiting than a whale-watching expedition:
"Blood and bile and chunks of my stomach come pouring from my mouth and my nose. It gets stuck in my throat, in my nostrils, in what remains of my teeth. Again it comes, again it comes, again it comes, and with each episode a sharp pain shoots through my chest, my left arm and my jaw. I bang my head on the back of the toilet but I feel nothing. I bang it again. Nothing."
Frey is so unrelenting with the details that the occasionally protruding spikes of black humor are a form of clemency for the reader. I loved the moment when he describes his Hazelden buddies for his quietly appalled mother: "My closest friend is some kind of Mobster. My Roommate is a Federal Judge. My other friends are Crackheads and Drunks. I sort of have a Girlfriend, and she's a Crackhead and a Pillpopper and she used to be a prostitute ... They're the best friends I've ever had." And there's a mordantly funny reflection on "Friends," which is blaring surreally from the clinic TV: "The only people I know who spend so much time in one Apartment usually have black plastic taped over the windows and guns in the closet and burn marks on their lips and fingers and huge locks on the door. They are not witty people, though their paranoia can be amusing." (That's a remark one could imagine, oh, Dave Eggers making, but coming from someone who's actually spent time in such apartments, it's immeasurably more biting.) And, perhaps most enjoyable of all, is Frey's rant against an unnamed rock star (Steven Tyler?), a Hazelden alumnus who comes back to deliver a highly romanticized account of his own recovery. "Were I in my normal frame of mind," Frey writes, "I would stand up, point my finger, scream Fraud, and chase this Chump Motherfucker down and give him a beating ... I would tell him that if I ever heard of him spewing his bullshit fantasies in Public again, I would cut off his precious hair, scar his precious lips, and take all of his goddamned gold records and shove them straight up his ass."
That was Frey then. This, sadly, is Frey talking more recently to Entertainment Weekly: "When I walk into Random House, they treat me like a rock star. People are breathless. They can't believe I'm alive. They're like 'Oh! Oh! Oh!'" Sounds like just one more bullshit fantasy to me. Frey is being compared to lots of people -- Eggers, Bukowski, Wallace -- but the swaggering gait and the relish for the mike are more akin to Norman Mailer than anyone else. Like Mailer, Frey publicly grapples with the dark, unruly force within him. (Call it "the Fury"; call it "the Beast"; it doesn't matter.) And like Mailer, Frey imparts the sense of an embattled ego struggling not just to assert but to impose itself, to clear the field of all comers. And so if we think of "Million Little Pieces" as Frey's "Naked and the Dead" (the same foxhole camaraderie, the same insistence on male ritual), what are we to make of the public persona Frey is consciously or unconsciously creating through the unstable medium of publicity tours? Is this his "Advertisements for Myself"?
In fact, it took Mailer years to overcome his initial success. And while he went on to write great books -- "Armies in the Night," "The Executioner's Song" -- he has spent the last two decades playing the role of dial-up provocateur, obscuring his considerable gifts as an observer by allowing himself to be observed more and more by others. He blows hard, all right -- so does Gore Vidal -- but that doesn't make either one of them serious.
I think James Frey, by contrast, is serious. I like how, in his Observer interview, he talks about "moving against the trend of irony" and being "a bullet in the heart of that bullshit." A writer unafraid of feeling is someone to stick around for. But if celebrity is an addiction, and if addiction, to quote Frey, is a choice, then his choice begins now. He can spend more time in his glassed-in lion's den, chewing on the red meat fed him by interviewers, or he can take himself as seriously as he wants to be taken. Squeeze the hyperbole out of his pores and quietly (or noisily) refine his craft and tell the stories he wants to tell. He can, to quote the Tao Te Ching, let it be. And maybe, in the process, he'll become what he so desperately wants. At any rate, it'll be fun to watch him try.
This story has been corrected from the original.
There are two stories wound together in this first novel, and as is often the case, one is more engaging than the other. The first describes a visit to Ukraine by a 20-year-old American named Jonathan Safran Foer. (You just have to ignore the fact that the device of putting a character with the author's name in a novel outlived its freshness before Foer was born, in 1977.) This part of the book is told by Alexander Perchov, a Ukrainian, also 20, who gets shanghaied into acting as Foer's tour guide and semi-competent translator when Foer visits the country. Like many Jews of his generation, Foer wants to touch the pulse of his roots, to see the village of Trachimbrod, where his grandfather was born and raised, and to meet the woman whose family saved him from the Nazis. The two young men are trading manuscripts, and so the narrative alternates excerpts from Alex's account of Foer's visit and his letters to Jonathan with installments of Jonathan's own novel.
At first, Alex's version of English resembles an out-of-control garden hose turned on full-force and allowed to thrash away on a summer lawn. He's got a thesaurus and he'll be damned if he's not going to use it. After bragging about the number of girls who "want to be carnal" with him, and his propensity for "performing so many things that can spleen a mother," he explains his love for American-style culture: "I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa." His youth and his mangled English at first make him seem simply naive, but that hides a native apprehension that, uninhibited by oversophisticated politesse, can be startling. "There were parts of it I did not understand," he writes of Jonathan's novel. "But I conjecture that this is because they were very Jewish, and only a Jewish person could understand something so Jewish. Is that why you think you are chosen by God, because only you can understand the funnies that you make about yourself?"
If only the fictional Jonathan's novel were really that esoteric. The manuscript he sends to Alex is a tiresomely familiar thing, a folklorical saga of life in the shtetl of Trachimbrod, full of lusty villagers and their quasi-magical adventures. The Alex sections of the book feel utterly alive and teeter invigoratingly between hilarity and a terrible, creeping dread. By contrast, the Trachimbrod sections only remind the reader of other works -- rehashed Chagall and dime-store Garcia Marquez. There are some pretty passages here, but even these have a framed, almost twee quality. (And, in what seems to be an effort at earthiness, the story also strays into the simply gross, as when a male character with a withered arm uses it as a dildo to console all the widows in town.)
Ordinarily, this caveat would make "Everything is Illuminated" unrecommendable, but the Alex portions of the novel are so good that in the final calculation they far outbalance the book's weaknesses. (Plus you can skim the Trachimbrod sections without missing that much.) With Alex's grandfather (who keeps claiming he's blind and insists on bringing along a "seeing-eye bitch" obtained from "the home for forgetful dogs") as their driver, the two youths head into the Ukrainian countryside and the darkness of the past. Their burgeoning friendship and the way that history and chance keep the balance of power between them -- and their capacity to know each other -- in constant flux, make this feel like a story that, astonishingly enough, has never really been told before.
Foer exquisitely executes the book's best jokes: the way that Jonathan's minor flaws -- his vanity, his American cluelessness, his tendency to patronize -- filter through Alex's admiring portrait of the young man he calls his "most premium friend" and "the hero." As the novel shades inexorably into the tragic mode, and as Alex comes to be a much better writer than Jonathan, with both a finer sense of truth and a more urgent understanding of the need for happy endings, his stumbling English incandesces into eloquence. And that alone is worth the price of admission.
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