Big engine under modest hood packs punch in family drama
FICTION
By page 50, I was flipping virtual pages on my phone to see just how many more I had to go (answer: 521).
By page 200, I was thinking as much about how a writer could screw up this much and whether everyone was going to go back to reread “Everything Is Illuminated” to see what made them think Jonathan Safran Foer was good in the first place.
Then, from page 345 to 351, there was a eulogy delivered by a rabbi that made me forgive everything and briefly consider converting to Judaism.
By 400, I figured the whole thing must be a big literary trick, a meta-novel that should be read as a damning exegesis of itself.
“Here I Am” is the story of a family butting up against just how Jewish they are — or aren’t.
More precisely, it’s the story of the male members of that family — a father and three sons — whose depths the author plums against the backdrop of a mother whose motivations seem to be only guessed at by her creator.
It’s also the story of a writer whose imagination seems, as his career unfolds, to be extremely hemmed in and incredibly claustrophobic.
Foer understands boys of various ages — or, at least, certain kinds of boys of various ages — because he used to be one, and men, within three years of his own age, because he is one.
However, anyone older than him — an age he has not yet been — becomes a stereotype. Ditto anyone who grew up outside of a major American city.
There’s a lot of power under the hood here, including some gorgeous lines and startling observations. Foer is smart. Unfortunately, he too often puts them into characters’ mouths in situations that you’d have to be an idealized child of an unholy IVF salad tossed by Gore Vidal, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Fran Lebowitz to be able to pull off.
There’s probably something more to the hidden TV script that predicts lines the characters end up saying in real life, or to the discussion of the Wailing Wall as the ancient temple’s fourth wall that could not be torn down (and then, toward the end of the book, finally does) — but “Here I Am” is ultimately a 12-cylinder engine in a quite modest Subaru.
And just now, in the hours after finishing this book, I wonder if that might not be just what the author Jonathan Safran Foer is, as well.