Review | Book review: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am
Author's long-awaited third novel is an entertaining literary work that travels from first-world problems – infidelity, the death of an online avatar – to crisis in Israel, but doesn’t quite take off
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“Is there something you need to tell me?” This question is posed by Julia Bloch, the heroine of Jonathan Safran Foer’s long-awaited third novel, to her husband, Jacob, in the first of several fantastic set pieces. The couple have been happily married for almost two decades and have three young sons: Sam, Max and Benji.
Julia’s question, ominous at the best of times, sends shockwaves through the couple’s relationship. In superficial terms, it refers to a mobile phone she has found hidden in a bathroom. “There is not a single story about a cell phone that ends well,” another character, Mark, says later. He’s not wrong: Jacob has been sending sexually explicit texts to a colleague (he’s a television writer).
Her husband’s idiocy notwithstanding, Julia’s question is really aimed at their entire marriage, her family (including maverick grandfather-in-law Isaac), and everything the Blochs can and, more importantly, cannot say. After some skin-crawling sparring about passwords, the scene and the marriage unravel with a dizzying hysteria. Jacob is unintentionally hilarious as he frames and reframes the rhetoric of the discussion, deferring the grist of the conversation until the truth – or truths – finally emerge.
Anger lends Julia (who knew what Jacob had written all along) cool, devastating precision: “You want to want some kind of sexually supercharged life, but you actually want the gate-checked stroller ... ’cause it spares you worrying about erections.” While Julia is “letting go of appearances”, Jacob will do anything to maintain them: he contextualises, minimises, rationalises and plays the victim. “I am disgusting,” he says, without really meaning it. The family’s infirm dog, Argus, moans at conveniently inappropriate moments as if he were a Greek chorus in canine form.