So what if I’m late to this party

Ever since Deborah Solomon’s insanely gushy profile of Jonathan Safran Foer hit the stands last weekend, there have been several notable reactions. Ed’s was the funniest, and Galleycat’s the most pointed:

Worse, though, than Solomon’s fulsome prose, is the sheepish but single-minded narcissism Foer brings to his role as interviewee. He applies a med school student’s discipline to the task of talking about himself, hoping, perhaps, that studiousness can obscure the elective nature of his self-importance. "In scarcely more than a month," Solomon writes, she received "some 150 e-mail messages from Foer, many of them wickedly hilarious, others gravely literary, and running to thousands of words." She continues:

During the weeks I was working on this article, he answered the questions that were put to him and reported on his whereabouts on a nearly daily basis; indeed, sometimes on an hourly basis. A kind of epistolary climax was reached one Sunday earlier this month, when I received a total of 19 e-mail messages from him…

”I think it would be nice to meet again,” he wrote one day. ”It will give me a chance to give you a fuller picture — even if the fuller picture is not a better picture. . . . It pains me to think that I have not yet given you enough about me, as a person.”

When it comes to JSF, I don’t think it’s fair to write off people’s dislike for him as jealousy. It’s not his success people dislike; it’s his personality, which we wouldn’t be acquainted with if not for his success.

I really only have one thing to add to this: if someone sent me 19 email messages in one day, I’d be on their ISP’s ass instantly, reporting them as some kind of stalker…

UPDATE: The Observer’s Tom Scocca gets in on the act most amusingly. (Second item.)