Writer Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel blends domestic, global upheaval
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of two best-selling and award-winning novels, as well as a best-selling work of non-fiction. His newest novel in over a decade, "Here I Am," is about family legacy couched in a wider conversation about religious identity. The title references a line in the Book of Genesis.
In "Here I Am," Jacob and Julia Bloch are an upper-middle-class American couple living in Washington, DC. Julia is an architect disillusioned with her practice; Jacob is a former novelist who now writes for television. Their marriage is on the rocks.
Jacob is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. His lineage unfolds as grandfather Isaac Bloch's voice opens Foer's novel. There is also Jacob's father, Irv, and Jacob and Julia's three sons (notably the eldest, Sam, on the brink of his bar mitzvah and thus Jewish manhood).
Domestic life is set against catastrophic world events: a major earthquake levels the Middle East, creating further devastation and acrimony in a region already rife with it.
With this, Foer poses loaded moral questions about religious faith, history, family, and -- more specifically -- what responsibilities American Jews have toward the state of Israel.
Foer often juxtaposes the minute scale of personal life against larger political realities, examining the resonance between the two.
In "Everything Is Illuminated" (2002), a young American (who happens to have the same name as the author) goes on a quest to the Ukraine, equipped only with a photograph of the woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Jonathan's compass in Odessa is an elderly driver and the driver's grandson, Alex, a 'translator' with a unique interpretation of the English language.
In "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (2005), Foer tackles post-9/11 New York and the rampant American anxiety about security. The narrator is precocious nine-year-old Oskar Schell, who uses an opaque clue left behind by his father, killed in the World Trade Center attack, to attempt to uncover more about him.
Although Foer hasn't published a novel in years, he released "Eating Animals" (2009) in the interim, a polemic work produced from three years of research. Foer raises red flags about the practices within the food production system: genetic manipulation of the breeding stock, the barbarity of the slaughter process, pollution, environmental issues, and other such horrors.
He also conceived of "Tree of Codes" (2010), a die-cut book and design object, in which he reshaped the text of "The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz with extensive textual cut-outs.
"Here I Am" will be published on September 6 by Farrar, Straus Giroux in the US and Hamish Hamilton in the UK.
