Jonathan Safran Foer's New Novel is Just as Sexless and Joy-Free as Its Main Character

"Why isn’t falling the epitome of life?”

Jonathan Safran Foer is one of the most gifted prose stylists of his generation, and one of its most ambitious novelists. While still in his early 20s, he received a half-million-dollar advance for his 2002 debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which slips from Ukrainian nouveau-riche farce to sustained elegy for the Holocaust. His second, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, took on 9/11 in the voice of a precocious child.

But in recent interviews, Foer has said he considers his new fourth novel, Here I Am (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 592 pages, $28), to be his very first book. Compared to the precious and ebullient prose of his earlier books, it would certainly seem to be his entree into a new adult seriousness: a nearly 600-page cement block of upper-upper-middle-class realism set against the distant backdrop of Israel's destruction.

Here I Am tells the story of frustrated ex-novelist Jacob Bloch—sexless, joy-free, literally impotent and unable to be present in his marriage—who, in an uncomfortable parallel to Foer's own rumored history with Natalie Portman, is caught sexting an actress. The Blochs' son Sam is also absent to his family, preferring to live in an online world whose currency comes in the form of "resilience flowers." Benjy, the youngest, is a precocious child—prone to uttering Tumblr-worthy profundities like "Why isn't falling the epitome of life?"

The exposition comes mostly in long trains of dialogue so on the nose it often makes the novel clownish: "I would have respected you so much more if you'd fucked her," says Jacob's wife, Julia. "It would have proven something to me that I have found harder and harder to believe…that you're a human being."

But if you're unable to care about the tedious Blochs and their interminable anomie, their intimate flashbacks about how they could once give each other orgasms just with their eyes, no worries. Turns out, Jacob's troubled marriage is actually an extended metaphor for the state of American Jewishness. The novel's title is both commentary on Jacob and a statement of Abraham's impossible double love for God and the son he's about to sacrifice to God. "Jacob," meanwhile, is a hand-me-down euphemism for "Israel." Even their grotesquely sick and uneuthanized dog is a metaphor. Their grandfather's suicide is a metaphor.

Only the suffering is real. Unfortunately, it belongs to the reader. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Go: Jonathan Safran Foer reads at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd., Beaverton, powells.com, on Friday, Sept. 30. 7 pm. Free.

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