Here I Am

This is my fourth attempt at reviewing Here I Am and it shall be my last. (You can tell I’m serious because I used the word ‘shall’.) I wish I could blame my writer’s block solely on Jonathan Safran Foer’s brick of a book, but I cannot; my brain is working against me. Nine-ish months ago, I started taking a new medication and slowly (so slowly I didn’t clock it until now) it began turning off all the switches in my brain. Now it’s an empty abyss in there, filled only with self-recriminating echoes.

When I cracked opened Here I Am, I was looking for comfort, much like when I reread Never Let Me Go. They have their flaws, but Foer’s previous two novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, are lyrical and beautiful and tragic and cathartic – and that’s what I was expecting from Here I Am. Something to pull my heart from chest still beating, as I used to say.

In one iteration of this post, I started writing a comparison between this novel and Foer’s previous two novels; in another, I embroidered together snippets from reviews that say what I would say if I had all my faculties and my brain weren’t an echo chamber. Both attempts bored me, which is an accurate reflection of how I felt reading most of the book, but why should I take out my pain on you, dear patient reader?

Let’s start at the beginning: Here I Am is the story of the Bloch family, a Jewish family living in contemporary Washington, DC. Although there is no one main character, the novel spends a lot of time in the head of Jacob, himself the head of a nuclear family that includes his wife Julia and three sons Sam, Max and Benjy. Other characters include Jacob's extended family members: his father Irv, his mother Deborah and his grandfather Isaac, as well as his cousin Tamir and Tamir's sons Noam and Barak.

At first, I had a soft spot for the three boys in the novel – children have so little power in a story, particularly the story of their parents' marriage, but by the end of the novel, I wished they'd stop speaking and thinking. Precocious is the probably best description, but it goes beyond that. These children say and think things that children simply do not say or think. Granted, the same is true of Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but you’re prepared to overlook that failing because that book is so beautifully written.

Let’s go back to that cast list. Notice anything? Female characters are few and far between – and don’t expect too much from those that do appear; ‘main’ character Julia is so flimsy she's transparent. She serves mostly as Jacob's foil: reacting to his almost-infidelity, having her own almost-affair, punishing their son Sam, forcing Jacob to put down his dog and forcing an end to the no-man's land of their marriage. Then, at the end of the novel, she provides a convenient opportunity for Jacob to reflect on his life and wrap things up in a neat little bow.

The character I enjoyed the most, oddly, was Tamir. He's pretty offensive, but he's a straight shooter and he's in the unenviable situation of being unable to get home while his son fights in a war he feels he should be part of too. We learn details about him organically, while the grown man-child that is Jacob bemoans his gilded life that, if anything, he is ruining single-handedly but with zero self-awareness despite the ode to navel-gazing that is this book.

I keep comparing Foer’s novels, whether I mean to or not, but it occurs to me that the rambling, sentimental, lyrical style in Foer's previous books hides the weaker points of his writing, like dialogue – perhaps the author chose this book as a vehicle to confront his weaknesses, as much of it comprises lines and lines of dialogue like the longest play ever written. The conversations his characters have are stilted and, frankly, bizarre – surely, surely, no human person has conversations like this.

However, the comparison could begin and end with extent: the novel is 571 pages to their 200-odd. That’s 300 or so wasted pages in which the writer circles a lot of themes, but doesn't stop to focus on most of them, giving the reader a kind of slow whiplash. As Alexander Nazaryan of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "This novel badly needed an editor who lacked tact and wielded a machete."

There’s probably more to be said about Here I Am – about the themes of religion and being Jewish in a modern world with its many distractions, or about Jacob with his hidden script made up of mostly notes like ‘HOW TO PLAY ANGER’ – but I’m bored again. I’m bored of writing about this boring book and editing my posts about this boring book and reading other reviews about this boring book.