TALE OF A FRACTURING FAMILY HAS ENOUGH PAIN TO MELT ANY HEART
Foer’s divorce novel serves up an ambitious platter full of crisp observations and jokes
Jonathan Safran Foer has a gift for describing what a teenage boy calls in Here I Am, the author’s third novel, “the disgusting, smelly, smoked and gelatinous foods Jews suddenly need in times of reflection”. A funeral buffet, in Foer’s hands, is a lesson in the quantum physics of solace: “Impossibly dense kugels bent light and time around them.” He notes the way “Jews apply the word salad to anything that can’t be held in one’s hand”. His characters try to pick around the capers, literally and metaphorically. This writer’s belly is on fire; so is his mind.
Here I Am is Foer’s first novel in 11 years and is its own kind of buffet. It’s a divorce novel and a state-of-the-Jewish-soul novel and running below it, like a headline news ticker, is a plausible dystopian nightmare. An earthquake has flattened Israel, and the Arab world seizes this moment to unite and attempt to crush it.
This is a big spread, in other words, an ambitious platter of intellectualism and emotion. Its observations are crisp; its intimations of doom resonate; its jokes are funny. Here I Am consistently lit up my pleasure centres. Like Kedem kosher grape juice, it is also very sweet in ways that later made me a bit ill.
The rap against Foer’s first two novels, both best sellers — Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) — is that for all their abundant intelligence, they were precious. In each the author’s voice all but declared, as if in a stage whisper, “See how adorable I am.”
You wanted more sinew and guile from his work, more Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Instead, he again and again exited at the Glass Family station on the JD Salinger commuter line and ended up in some pastel cul-de-sac of his own devising.
Here I Am has its own gaggle of oppressively endearing and overachieving children, with their
cello and fencing lessons and precocious existential questions. (Can literature ban Foer from writing about children for a book or two, the way the NFL suspended Tom Brady for his role in deflating footballs?) Yet this is also Foer’s best and most caustic novel, filled with so much pain and regret that your heart sometimes struggles to hold it all.
Here I Am is primarily about Jacob and Julia Bloch — he is a television writer, she is an architect — who live in an elite Washington neighbourhood with their three sons.
Foer is a close observer of the status details of their lives, their “Miele vacuum, Vitamix blender, Misono knives, Farrow & Ball paint”, the “teak enclosure built for their garbage bins”, their intake of “Freudian amounts of sushi”.
Jacob and Julia are aware of their good fortune. Shopping with a client in a bespoke hardware store, Julia thinks: “It was elegant, and it was obnoxious, and in a world where the bodies of Syrian children washed up on beaches, it was unethical, or at least vulgar.”
This life is coming unstitched at the seams. Julia finds erotic texts, sent to another woman, on Jacob’s cellphone. An already distant marriage becomes a fractured one. Here I Am chronicles their slow and traumatic separation, one that some readers will search through for resonances with Foer’s own much publicised divorce from novelist Nicole Krauss.
Jacob and Julia’s insults fly freely; so do everyone’s. Foer’s dialogue is so crisp you can imagine him writing for the stage. When Jacob tells Julia he is going to Israel to fight, she responds, “What, write for the army paper?”
Jacob’s unreconstructed intellectual tank of a father declares about the Arab world, “At the end of the day, we love kung pao chicken and they love death.”
About mohels, he says: “If God had wanted us to be uncircumcised, he wouldn’t have invented smegma.” Even the jokes in Here I Am land. An example: “You know what Lou Gehrig’s final words were, right?” “I don’t want to die?” “Damn, Lou Gehrig’s disease, I should have seen that coming.”
Here I Am at its best is a reminder that, as Roth once put it, “it isn’t what it’s talking about that makes a book Jewish — it’s that the book won’t shut up”.
In Here I Am (the title comes from Abraham’s response after God called out to him) Foer’s great subject is loss, and he examines it from many angles. About his sons, Jacob thinks: “No baby knows when the nipple is pulled from his mouth for the last time. No child knows when he last calls his mother Mama. No small boy knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story that will ever be read to him. No boy knows when the water drains from the last bath he will ever take with his brother.”
A different sense of loss comes over you while reading the final sections of Here I Am, a sense that arrives with an awareness that this vigorous novel amounts to less than the sum of its parts. This book offers intensities on every page. Once put down it begs, like a puppy, to be picked back up.
But the book’s insistent winsomeness cloys. Characters begin to make comments that sound like insults directed at the novel itself: “Life isn’t a Wes Anderson movie”; “If I were you, I’d tone down the intelligence”; “You’re an adult, Mark, not a Shel Silverstein character contemplating emotional boo-boos on the stump of a tree whose trunk he used for a dacha, or whatever.”
Here I Am has more teeming life in it than several hundred well-meaning and well-reviewed books of mid-list fiction put together. That Foer can be so good makes us hold him to a higher standard and demand from him something closer to greatness.