Here I Am is Jonathan Safran Foer’s third novel, published in 2016, following Everything is Illuminated, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. “Here I am [again]”, it and the author announce, after an eleven year break from novels during which Foer published Eating Animals, a book about and against factory farming. The line is also attributed to Abraham, speaking to God, and Isaac, speaking to Abraham. Jewish fatherhood is as so promised one of the pronounced themes in the novel, jostling with the things that pose that relationship a threat: domestic tedium, too much material comfort, sons spending too much time on the computer, covetous thoughts leading to divorce, the call of duty to Israel. That last one is made extraordinary through some alternate recent history, and in the novel’s opening sentence it’s synchronized with the introduction of another, something like despair, which doesn’t fit the bunch: “When the destruction of Israel commenced, Isaac Bloch was weighing whether to kill himself or move to the Jewish Home.” This Isaac is the great grand patriarch of the Bloch family, succeeded by Irv, then Jacob. Jacob, our author stand-in, is married to Julia, living with three sons, Sam, Max, and Benjy, plus a dog, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Foer’s Israel is not actually destroyed, but there is a terrible earthquake below the Dead Sea and a war with the neighbors which Jacob almost chooses over the seemingly lost cause of his home life.
As in the way of the upper middle class, the old man is mostly abandoned in the novel, to give Jacob and Julia enough time to fret over themselves, the children, and the dog. Isaac commands respect, not so much quality time. “My family cares very much about caring for him, but not enough to actually care,” we learn from Sam. Julia is an architect, Jacob like Foer a writer. While she furnishes their beautiful house with such things as “a teak enclosure built for their garbage bins”, and bookshelves on legs “to reveal the inlaid floor borders”, there are uglier, more writerly details, as when “the fingers of Sam’s left hand were crushed in the hinge of the heavy iron door”, or when Julia’s in the bathroom washing her hands of dog excrement and “the sconce flickered but persisted,” signaling a sadness of “punishing” weight over the state of the marriage that she can’t possibly share with her husband. Jacob is meanwhile a mess of anxiety, jealousy, and a little SMS only sexual involvement with a coworker of his.
Jacob used to write novels, now television. This, one imagines and then confirms when reading reviews of the novel, corresponds somewhat to Foer’s circumstances at the time of writing. Jacob unlike Foer doesn’t have a novel in him, only a very ambitious and never to be green-lit TV show called Ever-Dying People, a grand statement on the Jewish-American Experience delivered through the story of the Blochs. For Foer, the acknowledgement of all pervasive television serves as cover for his high grade sitcom dialogue, at its worst when Jacob talks to his children. “Here I am,” a patriarch might have said in simpler times. But now life is very complicated and ambiguous and interesting because ambiguous and complicated, Foer labors to show us, so father and sons speak thus:
“What did you tell her?” Jacob asked.
“Who?”
“Your mother?”
“You mean Mom?”
“That’s the one.”
Or when the son’s feeling up to some cultural criticism, thus:
“What are you doing?”
“I’m watching TV.”
“On my computer.”
“So aren’t you watching your computer?”
“Sure.”
“What’s on?”
“Everything.”
“What are you watching?”
“Nothing.”
The sons are all painfully precocious, so much that Jacob can teach them that “Penis isn’t a bad word”, while approving of “osteotomy”, “nomenclature”, or “lamentation”. A game of hangman with Max which demonstrates the boy’s mastery of collective nouns leads Jacob to answer Max’s “argument of Blochs” (he’s painfully aware of what’s going on at home, too), with a “universe of Max,” a charming appraisal. Presumably the universal pre-condition of precocity is curiosity, and some talent for observation, for the pithy point and say what you’re looking at. Foer’s done well to stay young in this way, but he’s too aware of it as a value, so there are natural hits and reaching misses. Great grandfather Isaac does commit suicide, but he made it through the Holocaust. At his funeral the Blochs make a pretty sharp point of this: “the embarrassing inversion of what the goyim say about their guy: he survived for us.” It helps that Foer doesn’t try to take credit for that line through Jacob. But staying over with Julia in D.C. to oversee Sam’s Model United Nations, Foer tries one that we’ve already heard, complaining that “The TV was set to an advertisement for the hotel in which she was already captive,” the kind of thing best left to standup comedy.
When he’s in grown-up mode, Foer makes a dubious value out of grown-up talk too. The marriage problems seem to have come about partly because there are too many secrets and taboos, but the author is more than happy to uncover those for us: “The asshole, with which every member of the Bloch family was, in his or her own way, obsessed, was the epicenter of Jacob and Julia’s denial. It was necessary for life, but never to be spoken of.” One continues reading the paragraph those sentences opened and wishes that Foer had interpolated “or written”, and stopped there. By the time they reach their tenth anniversary and return to a Pennsylvania inn they’d stumbled into years before marrying, even the non-taboo stuff has been put on hold, and the most embarrassing disclosure is a bit of dialogue, “The only time in his life he impersonated Nixon: “I am not a crook!” There is surely something too self-aware about the count on how many times one has done an impersonation of Nixon, let alone given the same scrutiny by the stand-in’s author.
The third and highest value pursued in Here I Am is some kind of synthesis of the childish vision and the adult reality, a wisdom that contains the unfortunate experience but can be winsomely expressed. At the very end a divorced Jacob has to go to the vet so that Argus the beloved dog can be put down, a transparently manipulative but effective way to argue for the necessity of comfort in philosophy. Foer has been preoccupied with the many “silences” and “distances” between Jacob and Julia, and it’s the same thing with the dog: “Their relationship was defined not by what they could share, but what they couldn’t. Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable [sic] sanctuary.” Isaac, Julia, the remainders of Jacob’s three sons’ childhoods have been taken away, and the needle’s about to go in and take Argus, his best friend. Things are bound to get a bit solipsistic, though with the implied caveat that other people (and canine companions) might well exist and matter. So Jacob concludes with a readying and steadying mantra which he doesn’t share with the vet, rendered in italics (extra profound): “Life is precious, and I live in the world.”