Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer - review

An exploration of Jewishness that takes a long, long time. By Nicholas Lezard

Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

Getty Images

8 September 2016

On the one hand, this is a rich, beautifully written, ambitious and grandly moving novel, which looks both at the world at large and at the deepest concerns of individual lives.

On the other, it is an overlong, overwritten and self-conscious stab at greatness populated by some deeply irritating people and whose wisdom (the people’s and the book’s) rarely rises above the level of the fortune-cookie motto. (The blurb calls it “a great American novel”, and even without the definite article and capitalisation of “great” and “novel”, the heart sinks a bit.) You take your pick.

Jacob and Julia Bloch are a nice professional couple with three young children. The eldest, 13, is in some trouble at school; and he is studying, with extreme reluctance, for his bar mitzvah. The marriage of Jacob, a writer for a TV show, and Julia, an underemployed architect, is unravelling. We get to read their stories in what is at times overwhelming detail.

The first, 125-page-long section is called “Before the War” and the first sentence begins “when the destruction of Israel commenced”, so as you go on you might suspect that this close attention to the concerns of middle-class America will serve as an ironic counterpoint to much more grievous and important concerns. Do not get your hopes up. This is not War and Peace, where close attention is paid at the front line as well as at home. In Here I Am, we don’t get to hear too much about the war (precipitated by a devastating earthquake in the Middle East), nor does it say too much about how ordinary lives can be affected by war, even one thousands of miles away. Instead, it is more of an excuse to ask the question: what loyalty do these people have to their Jewishness?

You can be sure that this is a question that is asked and answered with extreme thoroughness. Mostly, Safran Foer makes it interesting, although I couldn’t help feeling that Howard Jacobson has raised similar questions in darker and more imaginative ways. I would estimate that about 200 pages of this book could be lost at no expense to its structure.

Then again, it might lose some of its sense of broad sweep, which is the kind of thing novelists do to validate their, or their characters’, pronouncements on Life. The characters being Jewish, there are few pages, if any, without any pronouncements on Life. The good news about the characters being Jewish is that often their pronouncements are morbidly funny — indeed, the best parts of the book, the ones that raise the most laughs — Foer is by no means humourless — are their rants.

More book reviews

1/18

It’s when they’re trying to be serious that one feels one’s will to live ebbing a little. And then you get a sentence such as: “A thought walked in, a memory: checking the boys for ticks on the porch of the rental in Connnecticut,” and you know by then, on page 171, that you are indeed going to get a long description of the parents checking the boys for ticks on the porch of the rental in Connecticut, and 200 pages or so later, maybe more, there will be a glancing reference to this episode, and you will wonder: is this an amazingly intricately-planned novel, so full of lived life, or does Jonathan Safran Foer simply find it very hard indeed to stop writing? Well, both, I suppose.

MORE ABOUT

Jonathan Safran Foer

Authors

Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer - review

Read More

More book reviews