21st century profile, redux

This Jonathan Safran Foer profile in the New York Times is worth reading, for no other reason than that it might make you wonder whether there is any point left to interviewing a certain kind of writer. This is a six-page profile of a 28-year-old writer who's been hailed as a genius and whose second novel is coming out soon. Deborah Solomon hits the usual marks--explore the writer's physical space, meet his family--and then explains to us why this isn't going to make sense--Foer writes everywhere, in bars, friend's houses, not just in his house, his family can give you cute pictures and anecdotes but no real insight into the writer's development. They're both very aware of the form of the interview:
"To be sure, writing a letter to a journalist and, by implication, to the wide readership of a newspaper, is altogether different from dropping a line to your worried mother. Yet Foer can be surprisingly intimate when he is on the record," writes Solomon, aware perhaps that what wakes this piece up is not her comments and her attempts to find meaning in Foer's life, but the detritus of almost obssessive emails he sends her way. And Foer is aware of the format, too:
"It pains me to think that I have not yet given you enough about me, as a person. Two meetings. What if, by chance -- by mood, by weather, by biochemistry -- I grossly misrepresented myself?"

Twice, I've interviewed authors who really had nothing new to say, and I couldn't blame them. They'd been done to death, over a period of years, decades in one case. Too many road trips. Too many essays explaining The Work. Too many literary festivals. Too many interviews, profiles, three-quotes-and-a-hook quickies. They knew more about their own lives--the Early Inspiration, the Moment of Clarity, the Years of Struggle, the Era of Grappling With Success, the Learning to Grow, the Not Being Straitjacketed, the Elder Statesman Syndrome thingie--to be able to even rework the old material any more.
With one, I gave up eventually and made the best of a bad job. With the other, we tacitly agreed after a point not to talk books and spent a wonderful evening discussing UFOs, the astonishing prevalence of lewd poetry in all cultures, and how to make a really good pasta sauce. Even when interviews have "worked", I'm always aware of how subjective they are. Oh well. Maybe they're like passport photos: they're supposed to be gruesome, and you're just grateful for the ones that come out okay.