Regretfully yours
An interview with Jonathan Safran Foer on his new novel, Here I Am
Jonathan Safran Foer does not like having his picture taken. That much is obvious, because as a photographer whizzes around him in the middle of Type Books on Toronto’s Queen Street, he shifts and fidgets. Customers observe with wonderment when they recognize him, while the booksellers wait eagerly with stacks of his latest novel, Here I Am, to be signed, its thick heft looming as large as the room’s expectations. The look of apprehension on his face could easily be mistaken for a superior attitude, but actually, he’s nervous, out of place. It’s a presumption the writer has been stamped with for much of his career, particularly lately.
The criticism kicked up a notch in recent months when T Magazine ( an offshoot of the New York Times) published a cover story on Natalie Portman in which she, a good friend of Foer’s, did an interview with him in the form of exchanged emails, heavy in their navel-gazing and big words. Adding their rumoured romantic history into the mix made the feature that much more brazen.
“I’m only aware of something like that when someone like you asks me about it,” he says concerning the negative feedback the pair received after the story was published. “I don’t look at it on Twitter, which is where a lot of it is, I guess. It’s just not where I am. I’m not too invested in media. I know that there’s people who hate everything that I do and that there are people who like what I do. I know that most people fall somewhere in between. Sussing all of that out won’t help me.”
Foer says he doesn’t read many of his reviews, unless they are from writers he respects – and then even if they are critical. But with his tortoiseshell glasses, an affinity for introspection and a Brooklyn residence, does he not feel the least bit of the pretentious hipster he is so often pegged as?
“It’s just a gross misuse of the word, I mean, look at me,” he says, laughing. “I had an interview the other day and the woman was like, ‘ I want to talk about the three Jonathans of Brooklyn; Franzen, Lethem and you.’ And I was like, ‘Ok, but you realize Franzen doesn’t live in Brooklyn and Lethem doesn’t even live in New York State ( anymore)?’ It was funny and embarrassing.”
But Foer is also his own critic, calling back to his pretension several times during our conversation, self- deprecatingly monitoring himself for Foer- isms. He speaks in something like a stream of consciousness, answering each question – even the ones he doesn’t like – at length. It’s just the way he is, which may or may not reflect in his current work.
Spanning four weeks of a family’s life in Washington, D.C., Here I Am follows Jacob and Julia Bloch, on the cusp of their divorce, along with their three sons. When an earthquake catalyzes a conflict in the Middle East, the Jewish-American family is forced to reassess their beliefs.
Foer was 25 when he published his award-winning debut, Everything Is Illuminated, which instantly catapulted him to literary success. Now, almost 40, he is divorced himself, with a son.
Here I Am is Foer’s third novel, published over a decade after Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. ( In between he penned Eating Animals, a bestselling non- fiction take on the dangers of factory farming.) With this new novel – and life – comes a new voice, one still very much finding its footing. Here I Am took a span of 11 years for Foer to complete ( two to three years for the actual writing, because it took him a while to reach “a place of pride”), but it’s that strained effort that leaves the book in the shadow of his seemingly effortless earlier novels. It’s too considered – as Foer himself is accused of being, though he doesn’t seem so in person. The true origin for reputation in the literary world suddenly makes sense.
After we move on to a bench in nearby Trinity Bellwoods Park, Foer’s gaze wanders often and curiously; everything seems to catch his eye and he can talk about each for up to minutes at a time. But despite the digressions, he won’t forget the question, and in fact has a tendency to turn it right back on you. He’s an observer and a conversationalist at heart, qualities that have remained in his third novel.
“I mean, what happens in this book? It’s just people talking a lot. With Everything Is Illuminated, I was like, Jesus Christ, a lot happens in this; it goes from generation to generation. But this kind of style, voice and image is different. In Here I Am, I remember two people brushing their teeth next to each other. It just feels so domestic and internal. I think I gave a lot of room to things I didn’t used to give room to. The details of life. How we make breakfast and clean up after. I would’ve dismissed that when I was younger as not being big enough.”
That’s the gist of Here I Am: even its title is very big and yet not at all, pulled from the story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac to God, but applied to Jacob and Julia’s struggle to rationalize just how small they are in life and in the world. In Foer’s own words, the book, which comes in at nearly 600 pages, offers a whole lot of “muchness.”
“With each book, I’ve always had this funny feeling like this is the last one I’m ever going to write, so I better do it all, which is totally ridiculous and doesn’t necessarily serve my books or me well,” he says. “I’m not an expert of anything … but I’m definitely the expert of my own imagination. And I love the feeling of mining it completely, like the way a kid does with a bowl of cookie batter, just get every last bit of it. And with this book, I ate it and then I ate the bowl, I licked my hands clean, there was nothing left.”
While in Milan recently for a stop on his book tour, Foer went to see Rondanini Pietà, Michelangelo’s last sculpture, which includes two figures, but five arms. The tour guide explained that originally there was another figure, but Michelangelo couldn’t remove its arm without compromising the centre of gravity and toppling the sculpture.
“The art term for that is a ‘regret,’” Foer reveals. “It also happened to be my favourite part of the sculpture, and my book is filled with regrets like that. I love indulgencies and redundancies. I just love muchness. I think it’s born out of that feeling of ‘ this is my chance to express something very important to me and I’m not worried about overdoing it, I’m worried about underdoing it.’ Here I Am is just all these weird appendages.”
Another way Foer’s novels exude “muchness” is his pattern of including a major geopolitical conflict as the backdrop for each. First it was the Holocaust in Everything is Illuminated, then 9/ 11 in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and this time, the Israel- Palestine conflict. Later in our conversation, when he begins to spitball ideas for his next novel, or a potential short story ( something he’s longed to write), it’s difficult for him to dream up a plot without a historical conflict as a through line. In fact, it almost seems compulsive: He’ll even quickly construct an entire plotline, then after a pause, tack on a mass conflict. But he thinks the significance of this is mainly in the eye of the reader.
“It’s one of those things, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” he says. “You can see it if you want to.” There are things Foer sees in his own work and now wants to avoid, too, “like this Jewish business. I want to see what happens if I actually repress the thing that seems irrepressible.”
As much as Foer is known as a preeminent modern American author, he is also known for representing a Jewish identity, a theme that looms large in Here I Am. But Foer claims that it really isn’t that important to him — until he starts writing.
“I didn’t have that idea and then write a book around it. At a certain point, it found its way in,” he explains. “I get really excited when the things you’re unaware of having seen or heard or cared about or thought about make appearances in your life – and in a way that is the story of my writing. I tend not to write about things I’m looking at directly.
“Judaism is a good example, I’m not a practicing Jew, or religious, I’m not a believer. Before I had written my first book, if someone had asked me if my Jewish identity was important to me, I probably would have said no. I probably would not have been interested in reading that book, much less writing it.
“When I wrote Everything is Illuminated, I was striving to write a book that reflected something about my experience of the world. When writing starts to have obligations to anything but itself, it stops being writing, it stops being fiction.”
It’s an interesting comment considering the broad parallels between this novel and his own life, but he insists ( defensively, having been asked about it too often before) there is nothing autobiographical about his work.
“I don’t associate with Jacob more strongly than I do other characters I’ve written,” he says. “But there is something about this book that’s more personal to me than my others. The sum of the voices, the sensibility. Some of it may simply be the fact that it’s been so long – the emotional investment. The day I finished it was a revelatory day for me. One of my favourite things anybody ever said about it is ‘ Writing is like pulling teeth out of your penis.’”
It’s the kind of abrupt, offcolour line that finds itself on many a page in Here I Am, embedded amongst the conflict. And it is very much Foer in real life, the writer he has always been. But if his latest offers anything, it’s the introduction of a newer Foer, still able to disarm his readers with conversation, but this time with a snapshot of a real family in the minute moments of domestic life. So as much as Foer does not like to have his picture taken, he certainly knows how to capture one, in words.
Given how long he took to produce Here I Am – and how every book feels to him like his last – it’s tempting to wonder whether we’ll have to wait another decade for a new novel. But Foer can’t say much about what’s to come, as he didn’t expect the past 10 years to unfold the way they have.
“If you asked me that question a decade ago, I wouldn’t have given you the answer that turned out to be the truth. I would love to write something short, I would love to write something American,” he says, catching himself, hands up as if caught. “Okay, I don’t even know what that means. Now that was a pretentious thing to say!”