Monday 28 January 2019

Book of the Month: Here I Am (Jonathan Saffron Foer)



The title of Jonathan Safron Foer’s 2016 novel, his first in a decade, is taken from the Book of Genesis. “Here I am,” is what Abraham tells God after God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The imputations of Abraham’s cryptic response are explored by Foer in the context of his novel’s gifted, if ultimately flawed, protagonist Jacob Bloch.

Jacob Bloch belongs to the third generation of Jewish diaspora, after his grandfather Isaac left the horrors of Europe behind and built a life for him and his family in America, starting as a shop-keeper. Jacob, a secular Jew, is a successful, if creatively frustrated, television screen writer. He has written a prize winning novel years ago, but, for several years he has been hacking out the screenplay of a popular sitcom, which, while it ensures the steady flow of income that supports the comfortable life-style in Washington DC, leaves him feeling creatively unfulfilled. Jacob lives with his wife Julia, and three (smart, precocious and, for these reasons, irritating) sons—Sam, Max and Benjy. Julia is an architect, successful like Jacob, and (like Jacob) is creatively unsatisfied, not having built anything yet. Jacob’s father Irv has turned into a provocative media blogger who has a special talent for detecting anti-Semitism (Europe has become a Jew-hating continent (when was it not?); French are ‘spineless vaginas’ who would shade no tears over the disappearance of the Jewish people; and Germans were the only true European friends of the Jews, but they were  bound to run out of their ‘guilt and lampshade’ one day) and whose preferred solution to deal with any anti-Israel sentiment is to take out the offender to an open field and napalm. As the novel opens we learn that Isaac, nearly hundred, is about to be shipped off to a care home as he is finding it increasingly hazardous to live on his own. Isaac wants to die but is postponing his death (as if it is in his gift) until the Bar Mitzva of his eldest great-grandson, Sam. Sam, who is growing into a surly and opinionated teenager, is in trouble at school having written offensive and racist words in his book (including the N word, which is totally unacceptable), a charge he persistently and tenaciously rejects. Julia does not believe him, but Jacob does. Here the reader gets the first inkling that all might not be well with the Blochs. And the readr is right: the mid-life snafu arrives.  The crisis in the Blochs’ marriage arrives over the most trite, yet the most devastating, of matters. Julia discovers texts Jacob has sent to a work colleague which makes you wonder whether the talented television script writer wasn’t moonlighting as a script writer for porn industry. Julia believes Jacob’s submission that although he and the woman exchanged salacious texts, nothing happened between them (she knows he would lack the guts), but that is not enough for her to stay in the marriage which has been losing its shine. Julia may have many good qualities, but forgiving marital infidelity, even though only in texts, is not one of them. As Jacob's marriage implodes and descends into the predictable pettiness, resentment, and self-pity (expressed, however, in scrupulously polite manner and language, the estranged partners being in agreement that they must keep up the front of reasonableness and moderateness for the sake of children), another crisis arrives in their lives which poses serious questions to Jacob about his Jewish identity in the pluralistic American society and its freedom: the destruction of Israel (Foer rather dramatically opens his novel with the sentence that informs the reader of this calamitous occurrence). The dramatic worsening of Arab-Israeli relations (if that were possible) following an earthquake, the ensuing mother of all wars between Israel and practically the whole of the Muslim world, and the threat to the very existence of Israel form the second strand of the novel. Jacob has a cousin (once removed) in Israel; he is the grandson of Isaac’s brother who decades earlier decided to migrate to Israel. Jacob’s Israeli cousin (as the cousin, Timir, is frequently referred to in the novel), is a confident, brazen-faced, assertive man who has achieved financial success doing business and deals that do not get covered in the pages of Financial Times. Timir (like Jacob) has got his leg over on occasions over the years, but (unlike Jacob) he is smart enough not to have got caught. Jacob has a complicated—loving but tense—relationship with Timir. Timir arrives in the USA with his middle son just before the Arab-Israeli war breaks out. Goaded by Timir (who informs Jacob that he does not have enough real problems), and perhaps subconsciously feeling the need to send a message to Julia, Jacob decides to go to Israel in response to an emotional appeal made by the Israeli prime-minister to the Jewish diaspora to return to the motherland in her fight for survival (a rare instance of hysteria in the novel, worthy to be in a Philip Roth novel). Julia does not stop Jacob (Julia’s depiction in the novel is a tad unsympathetic: she is a somewhat cold and distant figure who is bored with Jacob and takes the opportunity offered by Jacob’s inappropriate texts to end the marriage and start relationship with the father of Sam’s friend) and (predictably) this moment of heroism (or insanity) does not last. As this sprawling novel ends, the reader is left (or is meant to be left) grappling the questions of identity, relationships, and human existence.

Here I Am is (relatively) more straightforward in its structure compared with Everything is Illuminated, Foer’s debut novel (my most favourite). The novel has many sub-plots which appear to play hide and seek with the reader; they disappear for a while, only to appear briefly again when you are not expecting them. These digressions and subplots can be a bit confusing at times, and give a fragmented feel to the novel (I don’t know whether that was deliberate). Foer’s tendency to switch between formats (combined with chronological dislocation of the narrative) can be exhausting for the reader. Long passages of texts (bristling, I have to say, with incisive observations and mordant humour) alternate with long passages of stichomythia—so long in fact that the reader must go over the dialogues more than once to understand which statement is said by which character. As one can expect from a Foer novel, there are passages of great wit and verbal acrobatics notwithstanding occasional cross-over from irreverence to puerility. There are bravura set-pieces in the novel, and comic one-liners abound; but, for all that there are also passages which are long-winded where Foer seems to try too hard to be quaint.

Here I Am is a reflection on what it means to be a modern man in the modern world, Jewish or not. I read that there are many autobiographical elements in Foer’s novel (he was married to Nicole Krauss for ten years before the couple separated in 2014). Even if you did not know that, in Jacob Bloch Foer has created a protagonist in whose foibles—his neediness and self-absorption, his solipsism—as well as qualities (sensibilities, inherent decency) many men would see a reflection of themselves. Perhaps there is also a message somewhere in it: it is the heroics and not the sensibilities that will get you through life. That is a great strength of this not-perfect novel.