'Here I Am' isn't all the way there

Here I Am

nolead begins By Jonathan Safron Foer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

592 pp. $28

nolead ends nolead begins

By Dawn Fallik

nolead ends Sitting down with a Jonathan Safran Foer novel is like a reservation at a five-star restaurant. You know it won't be a quick snack. There's a certain expectation of what's to come - layered flavors, surprise combinations, and you hope the experience lingers long after the meal ends.

But in Here I Am, Foer's first fiction book in 11 years, readers will find the table wanting. Trapped by his own success, Foer's writing feels forced and "writerly." Every page is so laden with details and the minutiae of mundane thought that readers can never let go and enjoy the characters or their stories.

Foer is best known for Everything Is Illuminated and the wrenching 9/11 tale Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. His attention to detail, the energy in the characters and in the prose, swept readers along and kept them adrift in a sea of otherwise anchor-worthy sadness. That energy is missing in Here I Am, but there's plenty of melancholy to go around.

The main story is that of Julia and Jacob Bloch and the struggles of their upper-class marriage filled with labels, of appliances and status (which involves fancy gyms and hiring accountants). We watch their divorce and its impact on their three sons. The novel follows all the characters as they try to resolve their postdivorce lives with other people and with each other. Coincidentally, Foer recently went through a divorce with writer Nicole Krauss, with whom he has two sons. He's also the grandson of Holocaust survivors, as is Jacob Bloch.

We watch and read their racy, cringeworthy texts. There are cancer scares and sick animals and few light moments. Every decision is a struggle and a lesson and a lecture. Following Jacob as he picks out a brooch in a jewelry store, there's no joy in the glittering choices:

Was it nice? It was risky. Do people wear brooches? Was it cornily figurative? Would it end up in a jewelry box, never to be seen again until it was bequeathed as an heirloom to one of the boys' brides, so that she could put it in a jewelry box until it was one day passed down again? Is $750 an appropriate price for such a thing? It wasn't the money that concerned him, it was the risk of getting it wrong - the embarrassment of trying and failing. An extended limb is far easier to break than a bent one.

But wait. He goes back and makes the saleswoman try on the brooch. Would it make her happy if someone bought it for her? At this point, my Jewish grandmother would hit him upside the head with her purse.

There's a lot of Jewish angst throughout the book, about death, about food, about what it means to be a Jew, whether it's going through a bar mitzvah or eating the "disgusting, smelly, smoked, and gelatinous foods Jews suddenly needed in times of reflection."

There are no simple answers to Foer's questions about relationships, religion, death. As with Here I Am, sometimes all you can do is plod through and hope for the best.

Dawn Fallik is a former Inquirer staff writer and an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Delaware.