When art imitates life
Jonathan Safran Foer has again – apparently – turned to his own life for his latest novel, although the reader should ‘forget all that stuff’, he tells
'I like the idea of having moments when choice is compelled, when you have to say 'Here I Am'.' Jonathan Safran Foer
American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer is currently in a relationship with the late Heath Ledger’s partner, actress Michelle Williams. He had been married to the writer, Nicole Kraus, until their divorce in 2014 and they still co-parent two young children. Foer now lives in a $7.4 million brownstone in New York’s fashionable Brooklyn.
However, the 39-year-old Foer most definitely doesn’t want to talk much about himself in specific terms. This is surprising because his new novel, Here I Am, focuses on events that bear more than a distinct resemblance to his recent personal life.
Here I Am is the story of a marriage on the rocks following the discovery of a mobile phone with a series of sexts. Jacob Bloch is a successful Jewish novelist and TV script-writer, much like Foer himself. He is married to an architect, Julia, and they have three precocious children, Sam, Max, and Benjy, and an ageing, lovable, but incontinent dog, Argus.
The discovered sexts make it clear that Jacob has an involvement with another woman. However, in a breath-taking move, Foer takes this family breakup global. Israel is devastated by an earthquake and conflict escalates across the Middle East. The extended Bloch family finds themselves involved in tumultuous emotions, conflicted loyalties, and fast unravelling events.
But to speculate on the similarity between Foer’s own life and the marital crises of his characters is to be politely brushed off.
‘‘That will be what that will be,’’ he says of the comparison. ‘‘The work should erase the concerns and ideas the reader brings to it when you open it. The reader should forget about all that stuff and become immersed.’’
Foer is regarded as the essential novelist of Gen X. He has had a charmed creative career. His first fiction was 2002’s ‘‘autobiographical’’ Everything is Illuminated, written when he was just 24. Centred on a fictionalised version of his own family history, it concerns the Nazi eradication of a small village in Poland to which a character named ‘‘Jonathan Safran Foer’’ returns in search of his family’s past.
The multi-award winning bestseller Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close followed in 2005. In it, Oskar Schell, a 9-year old boy whose father had died in the 9/11 attack on New York, discovers a door-key among his father’s possessions and begins a hunt for the lock it opens.
‘‘Anecdotally, my impression from knowing a lot of writers is that there are two distinctive experiences. One is writers who always knew they were going to be writers … and then writers, like me, who came through the back door.
‘‘You can go as far as to say, when I wrote my first book, it was almost an accident, it was unexpected. It wasn’t a mature act of will. More like a response to a burst of inspiration or energy or curiosity … ‘‘
Foer remembers watching Everything is Illuminated come out of a printer when he was still at college.
‘‘We’d go to rooms called computer labs, and when you wanted to print, you’d put your print job in a queue, and you’d wait while So-and So’s three-page paper on abnormal psychology came out, and So and So’s fourpage paper on Moby Dick came out, and then next was my 400 page novel, and everyone looked at me, ‘What! What is going on here? Who is this guy?’’
Foer belongs to a close-knit family whose complex history informs much of his work. His father is a lawyer and the president of the American Antitrust Institute. His mother, born in Poland, was the child of Holocaust survivors.
All three of Foer’s brothers have now made careers in writing. ‘‘I don’t think that any one of us would have imagined becoming a writer,’’ Foer says, ‘‘let alone the three of us. We had a very typical childhood. We watched superamounts of television … I remember walking around the neighbourhood and sitting on kerbs and talking about the world or punk rock or whatever…’’
While Foer might be championing the normality of his upbringing, his brother, Franklin, has described their father’s experimental cooking (‘Falafel Spaghetti Sauce’) and dinner conversations that ranged from fart jokes and current events to French Symbolism and history.
After graduating from Princeton, Foer edited a book on the eccentric artist, Joseph Cornell, whose enigmatic framed boxes were filled with evocative objects, from cut-out birds to seaside shells picked up in New York junk shops. These assemblages resemble Foer’s books which include photographs, multi-coloured pages, and other graphic elements.
‘‘A lot of artists – I feel pretentious using that word – have artists that made them, you know. And Cornell was very much that for me. He made me realise what could be done. He gave me my first experience of love and life. That is the simplest way to put it … I realised that I wanted to move people in the way that his work had moved me.’’
Success followed immediately on the publication of Foer’s first book. He has now been translated into 37 languages and each of his novels has been filmed.
‘‘It has definitely made my life logistically different,’’ he says. ‘‘A very private person became a very public person. Someone who wasn’t sure he wanted to become a writer became a real writer. A lot of things that weren’t decisions at the time became very big aspects in my life that I had to often confront quite quickly.’’
Foer published no fiction between 2005 and 2016, but raised two children. ‘‘I think I changed a lot as a person over those 10 years,’’ he comments. Here I Am wasn’t ‘‘an effort to write something mature. It was an effort to write something from the place where I was.’’
Here I Am is a novel centred on parenthood. While Jacob and Julia are losing track of their marriage, Sam, their eldest boy, is enmeshed in Other Life, a roleplaying game, which seems to offer him his significant experiences. How and when the family dog should be put down becomes an increasing issue. A bar mitzvah is planned and conducted, with the Israeli relatives in attendance. However, the threat of war intervenes and the family finds themselves pulled in various ways.
For Foer, the centre of the book is the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, where God tests Abraham by ordering him to take his son, Isaac, up to Mount Moriah and prepare him for sacrifice.
‘‘I found it to be a very terrifying and moving story. There is some ideas of sacrifice that echo through the book, sacrificing one’s children, but also there is this notion of ‘Here I am’, which is how when God calls out to Abraham to explain the test, the sacrifice, Abraham responds ‘Here I Am. I am unconditionally here, present, without any reservations. I don’t need five minutes, I don’t need to know what you are going to ask, the answer is ‘Yes’.
‘‘And when Isaac begins to understand that something strange is going on, Isaac says ‘My father?’ and Abraham responds ‘Here I Am’. And Isaac asks ‘Why do we have all the makings for a sacrifice but no sacrifice?’ And those two ‘Here I Ams’ are paradoxical. You can’t be unconditionally present for a God who wants you to kill your son ...
‘‘Sometimes there will be a moment of crisis that compels a choice,’’ Foer continues. ‘‘Whether it is a contradiction about being a parent or a professional, or am I going to stay in this marriage or leave this marriage? They have to choose. They cannot both be in it and without it.’’
‘‘I like the idea of having moments when choice is compelled, when you have to say ‘Here I Am’.’’
Here I Am is on sale now.