In the words of Professor Gideon Rosen, one of author Jonathan Safran Foer '99's thesis advisors, "Foer was obviously a writer from the start."
Foer's book "Everything is Illuminated" — based on his creative writing senior thesis — hit stores this month. For the next year, Foer will travel on a promotional tour of 38 cities throughout the United States. He will also be a part of the Jewish Book Month tour in November, 2002.
On the tour, Foer will travel to bookstores and high schools across the nation to give readings from his novel.
"I hope that it moves people, and that people like it," Foer said in a phone interview. "I hope it strikes a cord."
At the readings, Foer said he plans to distribute postcards on which he hopes his readers will draw self-portraits and mail them back to him.
"I wanted to give something out, so that I could in some way extend the experiences of writing and reading," he said. "It is an invitation rather than an expectation."
The inspiration for "Everything is Illuminated" was partly derived from a trip Foer took to the Ukraine after his junior year, in order to gather inspiration for creative work, which eventually became this novel.
In the novel, a character — who bears the same name as the author — travels to the Ukraine after his junior year at Princeton. The point of his trip is to search for a woman named Augustine, who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis during World War II.
Another story line that intertwines throughout the book chronicles the tale of the Ukrainian translator Alex Perchov, who leads Foer on his journey. The novel begins with Perchov's interesting introduction of himself that serves to showcase Foer's unique use of language.
It reads: "My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother."
A magical history of Trachimbrod, the Ukranian village where his grandfather had lived, is a novel Foer (the character) is working on during the trip. Foer and Perchov are accompanied on their journey by their blind driver and his seeing eye dog Sammy Davis Junior, Junior.
Foer described the book as "above all things, about love between parent and child, between lovers, friends and generations, between what happened and what will happen" in an interview on Houghton Mifflin's website.
So far, "Everything is Illuminated" has received rave reviews from most critics in the past few months, although a couple of readers were turned off by the creative style employed in the novel.
When asked why he chose to give his protagonist his own name, Foer explained that he believed "all writing is a projection of one's self."
He also cautioned that the use of the name is not as explicit as one might assume. The name allows the author to change the rules a bit more than us-ual and, in turn, makes him more vulnerable.
"When I write I will always be creating projections of myself," Foer said.
Last June, portions of the novel were printed in The New Yorker, in an issue devoted to young writers. Esquire even named Foer's book number 37 of 42 reasons to be optimistic about the year 2002 earlier this year. Praise from these two magazines demonstrates that Foer's book is striking a cord with a wide variety of audiences.
Even after receiving a lucrative book deal from Houghton Mifflin and having Liev Schreiber option the film rights, Foer related that his "life hasn't changed much." Schreiber, a film and stage actor, is currently working on the script for the movie and will eventually produce it.
Foer said he still enjoys hanging out with his friends, going to baseball games and exploring parts of New York City, where he resides.
"I am living in the same apartment. I am writing the same sort of stuff," he said. "I am just not a receptionist now."
Before the book deal, Foer worked as a receptionist at a public relations firm in Manhattan. After graduation, he held an assortment of jobs including being an advertising consultant, math tutor, farm sitter, ghostwriter for a prostate health journal and archivist.
Foer grew up in Washington, D.C. and attended Georgetown Day School before enrolling at the University. While at Princeton, he was a member of Terrace Club and concentrated in philosophy.
"I did my own thing," he said. "I was not a product of the typical Princeton experience." His emphasis on experimentation and the arts allowed him to create a four-year schedule that was characteristically him.
Foer said that when he arrived on campus he was not sure what direction his studies would take. At times, he contemplated becoming a doctor. Eventually, though, the flexibility of the writing program attracted his attention. During his first year, he enrolled in a poetry class and "everything just grew from there."
Foer was on the staff of the Euphorbus Arts publication, a Princeton literary magazine. He also hosted an indie-rock radio show on WPRB. But mostly Foer spent time at the visual arts building at 185 Nassau Street.
He continued to take sculpture courses throughout his four years. Looking back, it seems that the theme of Foer's career at Princeton was experimentation.
Inspired by the freedom to experiment through sculpture and the creative writing classes he began to take as a freshman, Foer found a way to combine both with his idea of the anthology "Convergence of Birds."
During his junior year at the University, Foer decided to create the anthology after seeing collage artist Joseph Cornell's bird boxes — models of birds framed in artistic boxes. He sent out letters to famous writers and poets asking them to create fiction and poetry based on the boxes.
The finished product features the work of 22 American authors. The anthology includes pieces by Joyce Carol Oates, Bradford Morrow, Rick Moody, Robert Pinsky, Lydia Davis, Joanna Scott, Howard Norman, Diane Ackerman, Barry Lopez and Ann Lauterbach.
Foer had already been published in prestigious literary magazines before finishing "Everything Is Illuminated." He wrote for Conjunctions, Paris Review and guest edited for "The Review of Contemporary Fiction," as well.
Foer's professors at the University praised the young author as standing out even among a talented group of Princeton students.
"Jonathan Foer and I talked about philosophy, of course. But we also talked about literature and the literary scene," Professor Gid-eon Rosen said in an e-mail. "He's a pleasure to talk to — opinionated, articulate, self-deprecating but also self-as-sured, unusually mature.
"I count the year with [Jon-athan] as one of the most re-warding experiences I've had with a Princeton senior," he continued.
Joyce Carol Oates' praise for Foer's writing abilities is in accord with Professor Rosen's. She called his thesis "exceptionally ambitious even amid our usual gathering of young, ambitious and imaginative senior theses students in the Creative Writing Program."
Foer won the freshman, sophomore, junior and senior thesis prizes for his early work on what would later become "Everything is Illuminated."
Professor Oates, along with Professor Jeffrey Eugenides, oversaw the creative component of his thesis.
"Basically, Jonathan is a natural writer/artist," Oates said in an e-mail. "He's by temperament a surrealist. Which means that he can employ the materials of 'reality' without being restrained by them.
"This is a predilection with which I feel some sympathy, so we were ideally matched as student writer/ faculty advisor," she continued. "However, Jonathan would have made his way on his own, like any gifted writer or artist."
Foer said that the art and writing classes he took at the University continue to inspire what he does. Music, the people around him and even the weather serve as other sources.
While on tour, Foer will have to put down his pen and travel the country to speak to his readers. But, once the tour is over, he will come back to New York and continue drafting his second book, a love story that takes place in a New York museum and is about the "various lives that converge there at a certain time."
And it is clear that no matter where Foer travels, he will return to his own first love: writing.
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