Next to Deborah Solomon's profile of Jonathan Safran Foer in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Barbara Walters' pre-Oscar interviews seem sane, cynical, and impressively unfazed by the notion of 'celebrity':

When he smiles, he looks even younger, with teeth that seem too white and straight for a person of his depth ... A kind of poet-wanderer, he does his writing all over town ... The young Foer was flamboyant on the outside, grown-up on the inside ... ''Jonathan has had to live with so much jealousy, it's had me ripping my hair out.'' ...

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.