How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

Abstract

What causes the literary establishment to fall in love with a first novel now, in America, after the turn of the twenty-first century? This essay takes Jonathan Safran Foer's well-received first novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002) as a case study that answers this question in a particularly revealing way. The novel's path to fame is not representative of how first novels emerge into the twenty-first-century marketplace, but it does illustrate how first novels that do become famous can become famous in a market dominated by established authors, a market generally indifferent, or, at worst, hostile, to new names. In a memorable scene in the novel, Foer imagines the earth—as seen from outer space—to be literally illuminated by the legendary love-making of its author's fictional namesake, Safran, and the many others who follow his amorous lead. I argue that the novel's cosmic spectacle of loving in turn lights up a constellation of social factors that, as we will see, are maximally conducive to an author's being loved by the literary establishment.