With Jonathan Safran Foer’s gritty new novel, Here I Am, it’s hard not to read it in the context of his recent public divorce. The 571-page work deals with a nearly middle-aged Jewish couple who are drifting apart and going through the motions of separation. The book does its best to account for small moments that keep a marriage together or destroy it, articulating both how invisible they are and how short the distance is between one extreme and the other. Foer should be applauded for his diligent scrutiny of love and modern Jewish masculinity, which moves beyond the bloated narratives that make up much literary fiction to become a soulful meditation on identity and obsession.
