Jonathan Safran Foer on Here I Am
Here I Am is being declared Jonathan Safran Foer's masterpiece: a term he will hear nothing of. He discusses the controversies a book which features a Middle Eastern war might raise and why, in this case, it shouldn't
Jonathan Safran Foer looks pretty relaxed for a Jewish American writer who has almost razed the State of Israel in his new novel Here I Am. Any author could gleefully destroy the UK with a nuclear bomb; level London, or turn Scotland into a zombie-infested, post-apocalyptic wasteland and few would bat an eyelid. But Israel... those dice are loaded. “Israel is certainly the only country where simply to mention the name of it becomes a kind of controversial statement,” the author suggests later in our conversation.
The first question to ask though, a week and counting before Here I Am publishes worldwide, consists of a different neat three words: are you ready?
Are you ready for the impact of such a provocative subject? Of a book in which the Wailing Wall crumbles and scatters Jewish prayers to hit the shelves? “No, probably not,” he replies, sitting opposite, having just flown in from the US to appear at Edinburgh International Book Festival. “I guess I don’t feel that way.” For a writer who balances out critical lauding and bestseller sales figures with torrents of criticism (The Guardian specifically termed this pastime "Shadenfoer"), the new novel may still play for higher stakes than even he, the superstar bestselling author, is used to.
“What do you think the subject is? When you say 'a provocative subject.'” He throws the question back. Family? We suggest, although we could add marriage, duty, identity or self-realisation to the list; its themes are myriad. “Yeah, me too,” he agrees. “Sometimes when people say it’s a provocative subject they mean, like, Israel, which to me is not the subject of the book. Maybe home is the subject of the book. Whether home is inside of a marriage, or inside of a family, or inside of oneself.” For a novel you might expect to hinge on the premise of violent tragedy in the Middle East, the most pivotal moment is in fact the discovery of a mobile phone laden with compromising sexual texts, found in a bathroom in safe and secure upmarket Washington DC.
Belief and devotion
Still, it may be willful naivety to imagine that an earthquake and subsequent war in the Middle East will not have connotations beyond plot device, and be taken by many at face value. But it's too easy to presume an obvious metaphor between the crumbling Bloch family and the State of Israel. Simple to propose that the book links most strongly to politics or faith. But that would be far too plain a badge to pin on what is primarily a truly great dissection of the personal, with its flawed central character Jacob a most Jewish atheist.
“The only time he refers to belief is when he talks about having children,” says Safran Foer, “but the question synonymous with belief is maybe devotion, and definitely devotion is what is at stake, in the book and in the title. To what is one unconditionally devoted? There are things that we think we are unconditionally devoted to, until some crisis actually forces a real world choice rather than a conceptual choice. Do you stay in a marriage or do you leave a marriage? Do you go and fight in a war or do you decide that in this case, Israel is actually dispensable to you?”
The Bloch's excruciating marriage breakdown is admittedly more affecting than the eventual war: it happens on the periphery, filtered through the media in grandstanding literary form from an author well known for it, while the domestic is held in unflattering close-up. Even the fate of Argus, the ageing and ailing family dog, stands as equally significant. It is tactical emotional manipulation (perhaps a wry response to acusations of sentimentality in past works). “I wanted that irony,” Safran Foer laughs. “I mean, people can read about 100,000 people dying in an earthquake and it’s okay, but Jesus Christ, don’t put the old dog down!”
The issues of priority are shown as those of the everyday, caught in life’s headlights. Of domestic rather than global significance. “I think that’s a problem a lot of people confront,” he admits, “that I have confronted, that lots of my friends have confronted. The scale of our lives. Either as compared to global events, or maybe even more painfully, compared to the scale of what we imagine them being.”
'A Marmite figure'
It’s a puzzle concerning magnitude, but also perspective. The seemingly-comfortable, middle-class Bloch's are entangled in extremely bourgeoisie problems: how organic is the organic mattress? Do we have the best breast pump? “Certainly Jacob and Julia really wrestle with what is big and what is small,” Safran Foer says. In advance of his headlining Book Festival event to discuss this grand work,he himself is fretting over a favourite cardigan lost on his flight, trying to have it tracked down and returned by the airline. Life imitates art.
“So, this last interviewer said that I’m a Marmite figure...?” His voice inflects a question when I bring up the Shadenfoer. “I love Marmite. What can I say? There’s an old saying that if I had to choose between a punch and a kiss I’d choose a kiss, but if I had to choose between a punch and nothing I’d choose a punch.” He should know, having taken more of a beating than most. “As a writer you want to have a strong impact otherwise there’s no reason to write. Books don’t feed hungry people; they don’t cure cancer. The point of a book is to illicit a strong reaction in a reader, that is its function in the world.”
But attacks have stained the personal as well as professional parts of his life. And not reserved to only BTL vitriol. In place of a standard New York Times profile piece, his decision to publish a series of emails between himself and his close friend, the actress Natalie Portman, was deemed ‘cringeworthy’, and while Portman’s offering was described in part as ‘cloyingly pat’, it was claimed that ‘it is Foer who clinches the Dingus Cup'. Malcolm Gladwell, while complimentary of debut novel Everything is Illuminated – written largely in college and published in Safran Foer's early 20s – used the author as a case study in 2008, to argue whether genius is linked to precocity. There being a suggestion somewhere in the article that talents which burn so bright so early often burn out.
(Continues below)
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When meeting Safran Foer it’s hard to align the strongly negative end of his feedback with a man who comes across as reserved, polite and accommodating. He neutralises many such accusations:
1) Through outright modesty: “Clearly, I’m like the luckiest writer I know,” he says in response to the question of his instant success and the reported $500,000 advance for Everything is Illuminated. “Yeah, I’ve had incredible good fortune.”
Add to that two major film adaptations – the second, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, starred Oscar winners Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock. We even have to fight his corner in this regard, suggesting talent must have been as important as luck.
“But at the same time,” he says, “my first book was rejected by eight agents before I got an agent. Then I was rejected by every major publishing house in America. That agent fell ill and had to stop work, so I had to find a new agent. Then the exact same words in the exact same order inspired an auction amongst publishing houses.” But you still have to work hard to make things happen, we counter. “I work hard but I know a lot of people who work hard… People write great books all the time and don’t find luck. And people write shitty books all the time and find great luck.”
2) Through his development as a writer: "My, but Safran Foer has grown up," exclaims literary critic Stuart Kelly in his glowing Scotsman review for Here I Am. And it truly is an even better novel than Safran Foer’s two previous. Instead of burning out, as a writer he has come of age in the 11 years since Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published, ten years of which he’s been working on Here I Am.
“That’s a little bit deceptive,” he says. “I also wrote a non-fiction book [Eating Animals] and a bunch of other little projects, and I had kids. Life, you know?” And while he rejects any autobiographical overtones from this current novel of a disintegrating relationship – admitting at most that “the sum of the voices, the average of the voices feels personally expressive to me” – he understandably declines to mention the split from his wife during this period, the bestselling author Nicole Krauss.
The two were often dubbed a ‘literary power couple’, or far less kindly the ‘too-successful-to-stomach physical embodiment of literary Brooklyn’ in New York magazine. But ten years of life experience are bound to influence any author. “Everyone’s always going through these dramatic life changes,” he says, dismissing the idea that this past decade held anything out of the ordinary. “Yes, it felt like they were more dramatic during this period. But then if I was a betting man I would bet it will feel the same way when I write my next one. Every stage is a dramatic stage.”
Ageing and masterpieces
So, if his talent has been slowly ageing over that decade – in denial of Marcellus Wallace's maxim, his ass has not turned to vinegar – has he now reached maturation as a writer? Is this his masterpiece, as some claim, and if so, how might he move on from it? “'Masterpiece' as a word doesn’t mean anything to me, and if anything, it would only have negative connotations. I was just talking about this to my editor this morning, this was very hard to move on from. It was actually not my most autobiographical book, but it is far and away my most personal book.”
It is also an absolute tome, at almost 600 pages long, so if he is still on the upswing, we fear for his readers' backs. We mention the Hong Kong film Chungking Express, the offhand masterpiece Wong Kar Wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle made in the shadow of their epic Ashes of Time, as it was still in protracted post-production. Might this type of move make a refreshing change from wrestling with the titan of a book he has just produced?
“I actually quite like the idea of writing a book which is 100 pages, 150 pages, maybe like one scene,” he says. “This book has the quality, I think, of grabbing you in a way which is not always pleasant. I want to go a little further with that. I have been working on another book at the same time which is much more sombre, and I’m not ready for that yet, I want a little more pushing against. But I like the idea of it being a burst, almost like a Beckett; very concentrated, very brief and just like a flash.”
On the likelihood of Trump's America
He adds that he likes the idea of his writing “angling slightly towards America. My experience of being American, which is certainly every bit as strong as my experience of being Jewish, or Jewish American.”
And there will be much to document of course, with America currently in such a volatile political place. A mention of Trump provokes a mixture of indignation and optimism, that his predicted defeat will reveal America’s true self. “He’s not going to win. He’s going to lose in, I think, a fairly dramatic way, and the country that elected a black president is going to elect a woman. But just the simple existence of Trump and the fact that we are having the conversation about him is alarming.”
Post interview, we walk through the Edinburgh Book Festival press area. There's a photo shoot in process, the subjects capering in front of the lens. The author quickly predicts his near future. He pauses, utters a just-audible “Uh-oh – I don’t want to do this.” The vast majority of Festival authors have their pictures taken here pre-event and then displayed the next day in a wonderful gallery of shots hung around the grounds. We're not there to see how the conversation goes down (a polite decline, we imagine), but while many writers joyfully mug to the camera or strike a serious pose, next day the shot hanging with Jonathan Safran Foer’s name below it features only a copy of his book on a plinth. It reveals a shyness which must be endearing to everyone, bar the photographer. The big and the small. While the author focusses in on the mundane issues in his headlights – the lost cardigans, the unwanted photo shoots – readers have the small issue of his masterpiece to enjoy.
Here I Am is out 6 Sep, published by Hamish Hamilton, RRP £20
Jonathan Safran Foer was appearing at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 26 Aug