Here I Am, Jonathan Safran Foer’s highly anticipated new novel, is about the collapse of a marriage set against the backdrop of the collapse of a nation.Jeff Mermelstein
On Tuesday, Jonathan Safran Foer arrived in Milan, where he was promoting his third novel, Here I Am. One of the book's central narratives involves a war breaking out between Israel and its neighbours, triggered by a massive earthquake under the Dead Sea. "It's an odd thing to bring a book about an earthquake to Italy right now," he says, speaking from his hotel room later that day. Yet there was some symmetry to the moment, as well – the very first publishing house, Guanda, to acquire his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, was Italian.
"I remember sitting in my agent's office – I was maybe 24, something like that," he recalls. As they were talking, an e-mail arrived in her inbox announcing the deal. "I said, 'That's great, but don't you think it would be better if they were American?' She said, 'No, in addition to an American publisher.' I was like 'Sweet!'" He laughs. "I didn't know anything about anything."
Jonathan Safran Foer was, in literary terms, still a kid when Everything Is Illuminated arrived in bookstores in the spring of 2002. It established him as one of the most inventive – and, later, divisive – writers of the young century. Next week, 11 years after his last novel, Foer, now 39, will publish one of the most anticipated books of the fall. The book's title comes from Genesis, when Abraham answers God's call, but it might as well be Foer announcing his return.
"It's one thing to reach the end of a three-year project, it's another thing to reach the end of what can, at least in some ways, be described as an 11-year project," says Foer. "Reaching the end was more special than reaching the ends of my other books. This book is –" He pauses for a moment, searching for the right words. "I just take it very personally. It's not more autobiographical than my other novels … but it's very personal to me. Maybe not so much for the content, but how challenging the process of writing it was."
Here I Am is about the collapse of a marriage, set against the backdrop of the collapse of a nation. Jacob Bloch is a once-promising novelist-turned-screenwriter; his wife, Julia, is an architect. They have three young sons, a beautiful home in Washington, D.C. and their union has been happy for the most part.
However, the marriage is slowly unravelling, although neither wants to admit it to the other. Their dog is dying, too.
It's a sad, funny and often piercing inquiry into the meaning of family and the necessity of home. It's also a novel about happiness, or the lack thereof. Characters are constantly doubting their own happiness, or that of others, or seeking it elsewhere: Julia designs fantasy homes (they only have one bedroom) for her life after Jacob, while Jacob, in turn, browses real estate listings for houses he'll never own; their eldest son, Sam, meanwhile, spends his days wandering in a virtual world called Other Life instead of preparing for his bar mitzvah. Julia, when informed by a friend that he just separated from his wife, responds that "while we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment." That might as well be the moral of the novel.
"At the very least, our confusions about what makes us happy can lead us down wrong paths," agrees Foer. "The seeking of solutions to problems that don't exist, I think, leads a lot of people – but definitely the characters in this book – away from something they have that is good.
"Everybody believes that they can find what they're looking for somewhere that they aren't."
Foer has difficulty pinpointing exactly where Here I Am began. There were, he explains, several "different points of genesis." He began the novel in earnest in 2012, after walking away from the television show he'd created and was writing for HBO, All Talk, about "a fallen rabbi." (A plot line from that show – a character finds a cell phone with lewd texts – is key to Here I Am.) A section of the novel called The Bible, which is meant to be pages from a TV show that Jacob has been secretly working on for a decade, began life as a short story. And Foer long had the idea to write about an earthquake in the Middle East, to the point where he spent some time researching at the Geophysical Institute of Israel, outside Tel Aviv.
"It took me a long time to start, and to find the beginning of," he says. "I don't really write books from ideas. I tend to get ideas from writing books. So, in a way, it's almost as correct to pinpoint the genesis of the book somewhere near the end of writing it, rather than near the beginning of writing it. There's a great W.H. Auden quote: 'I look at what I write so that I can see what I think.'
"This may sound like an odd thing to say, but I actually don't have intentions when I write," he continues. "I don't have a point to make. I don't have an argument. There's nothing that I want to memorialize. There's nothing I even want to investigate. I want the process to be as open as possible, and as welcoming of intuitions and experiments – just probing in an effort to do what I actually think instead of what I think I think. And see what I actually feel, instead of what I feel that I should feel."
This process led to his debut, Everything Is Illuminated, about a young American writer travelling through Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Holocaust; it was followed by 2005's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, in which a precocious nine-year-old boy attempts to solve a mystery his father left behind after perishing in the 9/11 attacks.
During the 11 years between novels, during which time both books were turned into movies, Foer remained busy with other projects. Besides the HBO show, he wrote a treatise on vegetarianism and factory farming, 2009's Eating Animals; edited The New American Haggadah with fellow writer Nathan Englander; and published Tree of Codes, a novel-slash-art project in which he took the text of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles – his favourite book – and cut away parts of the text, leaving a "new" work behind. There was also a previously announced novel called Escape from Children's Hospital – inspired by a traumatic moment from Foer's childhood in which his best friend was critically injured while they were attending summer camp – that he wrote "pretty much in parallel" with Here I Am and still hopes to publish one day.
"I'm really proud of those other projects, and I'm in some ways as proud of them – Eating Animals in particular – as I am of my novels," he says. "But the truth is, if I'd been immersed in a novel that I loved, I wouldn't have done them. Not to diminish them, but my primary identity as a writer is as a novelist. It's the thing I most enjoy doing and most strongly aspire to do."
And yet, he believes "I could be a much more efficient and prolific writer than I am.
"The hardest thing about writing is not putting together a nice sentence. Most people can actually do that if they really tried. And it's not creating believable characters. And it's not structuring a drama in a way that's engaging or suspenseful. The hardest thing is just not stopping. "There's so many incentives to stop – because it's uncomfortable and it's difficult and, more than anything else, it's hard to care, over time, the amount that is necessary to write a book. I teach at NYU, and I've been teaching for 10 years or something like that – maybe more – and in all those years of teaching maybe a dozen students are still writing. And it's not that they're the most talented – or maybe this is the definition of talent that matters more than the one we're used to. They just persist. And, really, the hardest thing about writing is persisting."
During the writing of Here I Am, Foer's marriage to writer Nicole Krauss (author of The History of Love, among other books) came to an end. Foer, the rare author whose personal life is written about and commented upon, at least among a certain set of media/literary/publishing observers, started the novel long before the divorce, but that hasn't stopped people from drawing links between Here I Am's plot and Foer's own life. I ask him if he wishes he could publish anonymously, perhaps under a pseudonym, or be that unknown twentysomething writer again, sitting in his agent's office, who didn't know anything about anything. That the work could be judged on its own merits.
"Very much so," he says. "On the other hand, I really am the luckiest writer I know. If I published under a pseudonym I wouldn't be in Italy meeting readers right now, and you and I wouldn't be on the phone right now. At least it's extremely unlikely. My first book was rejected by maybe 15 agents before I found [one], and then she sent it to, truly, every publishing house in New York. And then it was rejected by all of them. And then she fell ill and had to stop working. And I eventually found an agent, Nicole Aragi, who initiated a bidding war among New York publishing houses, some of whom had rejected the book the first time. It was the exact same book. Every single word was in the exact same place. The lesson I learned was that it's a very fickle, capricious industry, inside a very fickle, capricious world. I'm proud of my books, but luck really had played a large part in my having found readers. And to begrudge aspects of my experience would really miss the point. It would be a shame. The overarching truth is that I've just been very, very fortunate and that if I write a book I know it will be published, and when it's published I'll have the opportunity to meet readers. And those experiences are really profound, and really dear to me, and dwarf whatever bullshit there is."