Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer review – self-expression in the Jewish diaspora

An imploding marriage and a global crisis collide in a dizzying third novel

Life in any community is almost always defined by rituals: participating in them, shunning them, protecting them, carving out private space in which to enact singular versions, or subversions, of them. It’s questionable whether scale makes much difference: are the rituals that bind a couple, a family, a school or religious community categorically different from those that keep a country, an ethnicity or a culture from disintegrating? Will those who live apart from others, by deprivation or choice, continue to perform guttering shadow versions of half-remembered custom and practice?

Here I Am, Jonathan Safran Foer’s third novel, makes of his readers a battalion of Alices, constantly shrinking and growing as they fall prey to seductive narrative inducements. At one moment we are considering the rage that can simmer within a marriage, the next we’re pondering the imminent destruction of Israel – in the world of the novel, not imaginary but real. The minutiae of domestic life and individual idiosyncrasy are so involving that when we discover that Julia, the central female character, sleeps in her bra because it makes her feel more supported, we find ourselves hoping for her sake that it is not wired (admittedly, this thought may only occur to bra wearers). Such are the things that preoccupy so many inhabitants of the developed world.

Julia, an architect who has yet to build anything, is married to Jacob, a TV screenwriter with a secret project on the go, as they all have. The Blochs live in Washington DC with their three sons, Sam, Max and Benjy. Their life is one of harried affluence and faltering integrity, their determination to be conscientious parents so ingrained they occasionally appear to forget their children. And at the fringes of their family tableau are the others: Jacob’s grandfather Isaac, the novel’s silent presence, planning to defer death until after Sam’s bar mitzvah; Jacob’s parents, Irv and Deborah, she the smoother-over, he pyrotechnically outspoken; and “the Israeli cousins”, about to arrive for the latest in a succession of tensely affectionate visits.

This is a novel of diaspora, of the elasticity of its numerous possible meanings, and of the pain caused by both the presence and the absence of the homeland it invokes. It moves from the intimate dissection of a family that has ceased to become a home for its members to the question of what Israel means to American Jews, and what they might consider to be their duty in the face of its imperilment. Its pathways to escape are enticing, but frequently lead to dead ends: Sam’s parallel life in the virtual world of Other-Life, for example, sees him morph into Latina girl Samanta, who nonetheless has to attend her own bat mitzvah, “a stepping stone in the charade of my Jewish identity”. And yet Sam/Samanta might blow up Other-Life’s synagogue, but not without first removing the Torah first.

“What on Earth would it take for a fundamentally good human being to be seen?” wonders Samanta. “Not noticed, but seen. Not appreciated, not cherished, not even loved. But fully seen.” Each of Here I Am’s characters plays chicken with being seen, fetishising their inner lives to the extent that they can no longer remain hidden, flirting with taboo and exposure. Sam leaves a list of obscene and racist words on his desk at school; Jacob loses the mobile phone on which he and a producer have exchanged explicitly sexual texts. His wife’s coded messages are even more obscure: “Julia liked printing calculators – the Jews of the office store, having stubbornly out-survived so many more promising business machines – and while the kids assembled school supplies, she would tap out feet of random numbers. Once, she calculated the days until Benjy went to college. She left it there, as evidence.”

And yet the Blochs are not silent. Apart from Isaac, whose knees will never fully unbend after his lengthy concealment in a hole during the war, they talk, continually. Here I Am is a series of looping, repetitive dialogues, monologues and furious shouting matches, a claustrophobic relay of disputatiousness and wordplay. Here is Irv, in his car on the way to pick up the Israelis, railing against National Public Radio, where “to his extreme revulsion there was a balanced segment on new settlement construction on the West Bank”: “Europe … now there’s a Jew-hating continent. The French, those spineless vaginas, would shed no tears of sadness over our disappearance.” The Germans, in his view, are the Jews’ only true European friends, and one day, surely they’ll run out of “guilt and lampshades”.

Safran Foer makes sure that Irv’s theory is tested sooner rather than later, courtesy of a striking narrative upheaval. An earthquake in the Middle East brings Israel to its knees, gifting its surrounding enemies a chance to finish it off once and for all. A sprawlingly detailed chronicle of family life turns suddenly into a spare, post-apocalyptic diary of collapse, which ends with the Israeli prime minister’s rallying call to the men of the Jewish diaspora to return “home”. Suddenly Tamir, Jacob’s bombastic, exhibitionist Israeli cousin, cuts to the heart of the matter: “Give more or talk less.”

Everything Is Illuminated, Safran Foer’s first novel, published when he was 25, explored the fictive and elusive nature of searching for a devastated past, dramatising it via the device of a language gap. His second, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, animated the life of a young boy made fatherless by 9/11 by means of a radically disrupted text. Here I Am appears more straightforward, even conventional, despite its forays into conjured cataclysm or cyber-worlds. And yet its structure is more reflective of its themes and concerns than is at first apparent. The atomisation of its central family unit is deeply unsettling; not for nothing does Sam fear that his parents’ possible divorce will “spread destruction like that Japanese reactor”. It is as though bad faith – that which sees us doggedly adhering to ritual even as it empties of meaning – is contaminating, insidiously harmful, limitless. What begins as a dynamic, imaginative shunning of orthodoxy – witness Jacob and Julia’s attempts to reimagine Jewish observance for their family – soon becomes equally constraining. “It’s a community,” explains Max when his father asks him about the mysteries of Other-Life.

“‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Jacob said, unable to resist using his most belittling voice.

‘No,’ said Max, ‘you don’t.’”

For all this, Here I Am is endearingly funny, its one-liners and comic hyperboles undercutting its inherent melancholy. Set pieces delight: a frenzied account of teenage masturbation that swaps alien-green aloe vera for Portnoy’s slab of liver; a call-centre conversation that will traumatise all parents who have accidentally obliterated their children’s online avatars; a duel of masculinity and pot-smoking between neurotic Jacob and lusty Tamir. Its failing marriage is both painful and cringeworthy: can one ever feel truly sorry for a couple who plan their 10th wedding anniversary trip to include “lunch at a small winery I read about on Remodelista”?

And it is also a novel about the inevitable and incomprehensible tragedy of the baton passing between generations. As Julia and Jacob agonise about their children’s development, while also using them to fight a proxy war, Sam and Max exchange views.

“‘He can be such a pussy,’” [says Sam of his father]. ‘Yeah, but Mom can be such a dick.’ Sam laughed. ‘Absolutely true.’”

Can there be anything more terrifying, more true?

Here I Am is published by Hamish Hamilton. To order a copy for £16.40 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Jonathan Safran Foer will discuss Here I Am at a Guardian Live event in London on 12 October.

Contributor

Alex Clark

The GuardianTramp

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