Here I Am

I swear Jonathan Safran Foer referred to Here I Am as his first adult novel in an interview, but for the life of me I cannot find it. Whether he said it or not, the divorce-driven narrative played out by identity-seeking characters yields his most mature novel yet, but not necessarily his best. I prefer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

The writing shines in Here I Am. Foer excels as crafting beautiful sentences and creative insults. Across this novel and all the rest, his writing speaks to the human condition. Here, for instance:

All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that’s at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy; the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlicks, backpacks, shoes, jackets. 

Who among us hasn’t wondered whether some invisible karmic ledger governs the long string of repetitive, predictable days that amount to a lifetime? Sometimes the universe is with us, other times it’s against us. Whether the counterforces are within our control or not, Foer reminds us that only we can do something about it. 

Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.

Which brings us to the core problem: All too often, we blame our problems on people around us or the world at large. Pinning our problems on others doesn’t solve them. And we’ll never win against the world. When we cannot solve our problems—when they really are outside of our control—the solution requires a shift in perspective in the vein of Viktor Frankl. 

The problem was the world. It was the world that didn’t fit. But how much happiness has ever resulted from correcting the record on the culpability of the world? 

Spread across the novel, these thematically consistent insights cut to the heart of what it’s like to be human. As does this passage in which Jacob reflects on his wife’s hobby:

Her homes were just stupid little exercises, a hobby. She and Jacob would never have the money, nor the time and energy, and she’d done enough residential architecture to know that the desire to wring out a few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge. 

We always want more and we’re fast to overlook what we have. This, too, is part of human nature. More often than not it’s desire itself that we want, not the object that we claim to covet. How often do we stop, look around and tell ourselves, yeah, I have everything I need?

What the protagonists in Here I Am needed was space. So they divorced. Wellness by Nathan Hill is a more exacting divorce novel. Here I Am aspires to do too much by tying divorce together with themes of Jewish identity. Yet, Here I Am is more fun to read. While it’s more mature than Foer’s earlier works, he retains the playful ness that made his earlier works so enjoyable.