This is a big spread, in other words, an ambitious platter of intellection and emotion. Its observations are crisp; its intimations of doom resonate; its jokes are funny. Here I Am consistently lit up my pleasure centers. Like Kedem kosher grape juice, it is also very sweet, in ways that later made me a bit ill ... Mr. Foer’s dialogue is so crisp you can imagine him writing for the stage ... This book offers intensities on every page. Once put down it begs, like a puppy, to be picked back up. But its insistent winsomeness cloys.
Perhaps without meaning to—because really, who would set out to do such a thing?—Foer has made a significant contribution to the emerging literature of the Gen X male’s midlife crisis. Here I Am belongs in the diffident, self-conscious company of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask ... despite his overly demonstrative efforts to be fair to her, Julia is finally a bit of a cipher. She’s the cold mom, the distant wife, the skeptical spectator in the circus tent of big-boy feelings ... Here I Am is a maddening, messy, marvelously contradictory novel.
...joyless prose about joyless people...I fear that it never occurred to Foer that his precious creations are, in fact, insufferable ... For Foer, [Judasim] is a carapace into which he retreats whenever the fundamental business of writing fiction true to life surpasses his abilities of observation ... Foer’s greatest failing in Here I Am, far more grave than its cynical reliance on ethnic kinship, is writing that is as incoherent as a curbside preacher.
...[a] hefty, often engaging, but ultimately flawed novel ... Safran Foer is brilliant on the quotidian tortures of marital discord, on the way that walls can suddenly spring up between people who’d thought they shared everything ... something is sacrificed in allowing Jacob’s dilemma to remain unresolved for so long. What might have been a brave and bravura ending is allowed to fizzle out.
...can you hang a novel of nearly 600 pages on a no-fault divorce that doesn’t involve adultery, remarriage, or acrimonious rupture? Here I Am suggests not ... The novel’s crippling flaw is that Jacob's thoughts, as they come through in the narration, take the form of platitudinous psychobabble ... The result is something like a Philip Roth novel in the style of a Hallmark card.
Here I Am worms its way closer to the squirmy kernel of Foer’s talent ... Foer never brings this drama from background to foreground; it’s ghostlike and theoretical, the undercurrent to Sam’s long-delayed bar mitzvah ... Here I Am returns him to what worked best in Everything is Illuminated: the uncomfortable probing of his own conscience. If too much of his fiction has felt cooked, this, at least, tastes raw and true ... This political gloss on a private misery can come across as an imitation of the social novels of Jonathan Franzen, just as the scattered passages of dirty talk and reveries on masturbation seem to ape Philip Roth. Here I Am is strongest when it dares to be unlikeable in its own, funny way.
The Blochs are witty and whip-smart and engagingly dour in ways that sometimes evokes J.D. Salinger’s Glass family...But Foer’s microscopic attention to a couple of days in the life of the Blochs pushes off the novel’s dramatic geopolitical crisis for hundreds of pages ... Foer’s ambition in Here I Am has more to do with scope than with language, but once he’s put in the position to write about serious consequences, he again retreats into precocity and tiny domestic tussles.
...as one burrows deeper into Here I Am, the solipsism of a gilded life becomes stifling ... Foer writes in the certainty that all of humanity shares universal experiences, so for him the particulars are often irrelevant, which feels like the most Brooklyn thing about him ... When Foer does try to address large questions, he is able to deliver only clichés in response, and not particularly resonant clichés at that.
[Foer] seem[s] determined not to tell a compelling story ... Here I Am meanders along via internal monologues, lists, speeches, gnomic pronouncements, Chinese boxes of secrets and lies, and endless conversations — all of varying degrees of interest ... Here I Am was your chance to prove that you’re not just extremely precious and incredibly self-absorbed. Unfortunately, it’s a lost opportunity.
What [Foer has] lost in precociousness he’s gained in a certain self-aware world weariness ... Here I Am has its own darling youngsters and moments of heartache, but what some would call treacly I will call sincere ... This book is big and awkward, not honed and refined, but the mess feels true.
...the characters, reacting to the duress of the moment according to the dictates of their personalities, may have their own immediate thoughts and feelings, but their author has a less quotidian idea, to which their interiority is made to yield ... The Blochs do not, in short, seem real ... To me, the surprising thing about Here I Am’s vision of apocalypse is how disproportionately small it seems in the scheme of the book, as if Foer, having called it into being with much fanfare, seems unsure what to do with it.
...[an] often brilliant, always original but sometimes problematic new novel ... Here I Am wants to dismantle traditional narrative in a way that ultimately adds up to — well, a traditional narrative, or at least its psychological and emotional equivalent. It breaks things in the interest of making them whole again ... either explicitly or by implication almost every aspect of the novel passes through the prism of Judaism or at least Jewish culture...this makes it feel a little restricted ... For all that, the novel as a whole supersedes its difficulties — especially in its emotional intelligence and complexity.
Foer’s scope is ambitious and his writing is sharp, but his affectations are often exasperating. Like a beautifully crafted music box with a catchy tune, the novel is delightful and annoying in equal measure. Foer’s preciousness mars his effort in two specific ways. First, his obvious identification with his protagonist narrows the novel’s range: Jacob Bloch’s limitations are too often the novel’s own. Second, his exquisite use of montage for comic effect undercuts whatever insight the narrative may otherwise promise.
...it’s difficult to sustain a novel with the kind of low-grade conflict that his ambivalence and inertia provide. To his credit, Mr. Foer is aware of the dilemma, and the book is replete with self-conscious diagnoses that might apply equally to Jacob and, one feels, to the current state of Jewish-American fiction ... A lot of Here I Am is just psychiatrist’s-couch platitudes ... In Here I Am, he invents the catastrophe, but he exploits it for the same kind of tackily ennobling personal transformation.
...more ambitious than its predecessors—thornier, funnier, and less susceptible to whimsy. It’s also more conventional, at least on the surface ... He is particularly effective working in a choral vein here, as when three generations of the Bloch clan talk all at once or a gang of filthy-mouthed boys try to one-up each other in their knowledge of sex acts ... Part of the frustration of reading Foer is how close he can come to brilliance, only to get in his own way ... There’s a moral shallowness to Foer’s concoction of a war on Israel. Its function is to bring Jacob to his personal catastrophe.
Dazzling and draining, dazzling and draining...Until the last hundred pages or so brought home the final verdict - just dazzling ... as absorbed as this novel is with those larger issues, it, too, like Jacob, privileges the personal over the political. Foer takes us deep into the despair that marks the crumbling of the Bloch family ... Here I Am is a profound novel about the claims of history, identity, family and the burdens of a broken world that weigh upon even the most cleverly evasive people.
Foer's novel doesn't fall apart — it ultimately comes together in moving ways. But his prose, hailed as energetic when he bounced onto the literary scene at age 24 with Everything Is Illuminated, is by turns clever and indulgently verbose...You don't need to climb a mount to see that sacrificing 200 or more pages would have made it a better book.
Although Foer focuses on the adults' problems in this book, he portrays the three Bloch children and their interactions with their elders brilliantly...The kids are never just props, but always distinct people. Here I Am contains reams of funny, insightful dialogue, with each person pressing his or her case, at cross purposes to the others ... Here I Am is a stunner of a family saga.
It feels like his Kavalier & Clay—a conscious upgrading of scope. But while it’s a work of real vision and feeling, it only occasionally realizes its ambitions ... Where the book is messy and scattershot elsewhere, there’s no denying the power of this [Israel] section ... What would be the book’s most compelling section is given over to the show-offy literary device of a show 'bible,' Jacob’s in-book explanation of his TV show, which allows for Foer’s various themes and ideas to be spelled out explicitly. If that sounds masturbatory, know there is a multi-page section describing how one character pleasures himself ... At the same time, his willingness to swing for the fences and embrace sincerity are among his strongest qualities.
Here I Am is a series of looping, repetitive dialogues, monologues and furious shouting matches, a claustrophobic relay of disputatiousness and wordplay ... Here I Am is endearingly funny, its one-liners and comic hyperboles undercutting its inherent melancholy. Set pieces delight.
...[Foer] burrows deep into their domestic anguish and comes back out with captivating prose, refreshingly free of the gimmicky bells and whistles of his earlier novels. Even if you find Foer’s cloyingly clever characters and overuse of metaphors to be insufferable (and many do), the marital autopsy might keep you around ... Foer goes on to spend countless exhausting pages wrestling with big-picture questions about family and home and belonging, and then goes on to spend more countless exhausting pages doing it some more.
There’s pleasure in watching Foer wrestle with those questions in rich, sprawling sentences, but it’s also wearying. Foer’s characters analyze everything so much, so compulsively, throughout Here I Am’s 600 pages, that they begin to feel like nothing more than over-articulate, disembodied brains. The solipsism inherent to the book’s structure is more than a little grating, and Foer’s unabashed sentimentality doesn’t always land ... it begins to feel dismissive to reduce [Israel] to a symbolic supporting player in the portrait of a yuppie marriage ... All the same — despite the claustrophobia and the solipsism and the Freud — there is an undeniable joy to be had in reading Foer’s textured, playful prose ... Here I Am is not perfect, but damn it, it tries. It swings for the fences. It’s ambitious, and if nothing else, its ambition makes it exciting to read.
...[a] hilarious and heart-rending new novel ... The Blochs are supremely irritating, and at times so is this novel; it’s painful and exhausting to immerse yourself in the existence of people so blessed and so brilliant, yet too dense — and perhaps too far removed from their own tradition — to feel gratitude for the peace and richness of their lives. But the Blochs are also wonderful ... One of Foer’s many achievements with Here I Am is invigorating such a well-worn genre.
Critics who envied Foer’s early success and resented the cloying cuteness of prose speckled with typographical tricks might now take heart from evidence that the author has grown up, settling into the Great Flatness of American realism ... Rejecting the whimsy of Laurence Sterne for something closer to the spissitude of Jonathan Franzen, Foer now takes the measure of a man’s life, including its longueurs.
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 ... 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.
Some readers may find it odd that Mr. Foer devotes far less time to the destruction of Israel than to a relatively ordinary story about divorce. And the plot device of Tamir arriving in the U.S., where he can discuss Middle East politics with his stateside relatives, at the precise moment that an earthquake strikes his country is too convenient. But amid the structural flaws is an eloquent novel about responsibility ... The richness of Here I Am is in its willingness to challenge accepted answers to common dilemmas.
...for all its evident ambition, Here I Am is a disappointment from a writer of his talent ... In juxtaposing domestic drama with a world-altering geopolitical catastrophe, Foer has created a potent dramatic premise. But instead of using it to explore the eternal dilemmas of what Jacob calls the 'Ever-Dying People' in a television script he’s worked on in secret for years, Foer never shifts his attention for long from the Blochs’ only mildly interesting marital woes ... He skillfully captures the lacerating criticism and frequent dry wit of Jacob and Julia’s exchanges, but even the sharpest of these eventually lose their power.
Foer excels at dialogue, and captures well the voices of the five members of the Bloch family: funny, affectionate, always questing, sometimes enraged ... The whole [Israel section] is, however, woefully under-imagined and reveals a very shaky grasp of geopolitics as the earthquake results in the rapid unification of the 'Muslim world' ... Foer is immensely gifted and he knows it. But he ought to use his gifts more wisely: in this new novel he has overplayed his hand and is ultimately undone by a combination of look-at-me overconfidence and self-indulgence.
Here I Am is full of beautiful writing and passages of family life that are moving, challenging, and astute. The story is intricate and imaginative, and despite a plot that strains to accommodate its breadth, and despite a lacking female lead, it is memorable and worthwhile.
...[a] moving, maddening and messy novel ... Safran Foer is excellent in summarizing how an idealistic couple moves from A to Z ... Safran Foer is far less successful when applying the lessons learned through this domestic drama to the larger story he simultaneously tells, involving an earthquake that nearly destroys an embattled Israel ... it’s an imperfect novel...But I’m confident I’ll continue recommending its uneven sprawl because it rightly dares to insist that it nevertheless has something vital to say.
Foer’s dialogue is also strong, crackling with energy reminiscent of gatherings with my own Jewish family. He proves especially proficient in busy scenes with more than two speaking characters. However, there are long stretches of time when nobody is speaking, and interiority is not his strong suit by any means. Julia’s inner life is constructed particularly poorly. The writing is overwrought and leans on lists of superficial opinions to create the illusion of character depth, and sometimes it borders on unreadable. When he is willing to allow actions to characterize her, they are bizarre and unbelievable ... The point of this, of almost starting World War III, is not to highlight the instability in the Middle East or the danger citizens of the region face or to even add to the conversation about Israel and its relationship with those around it. Instead, the point of this is to highlight the dissonance involved in being an American Jew, and specifically being Jacob, an American Jew who feels like a feckless wimp because he is a feckless wimp and struggling to bear the weight of how 'manlier' men see him. And all of that is very bad. It feels wrong in the moment, and the more one thinks about it, the worse it gets...The tragedy that is supposed to give the book its power is a shortcut, a way of giving the book emotional muscle without doing any weightlifting ... In spite of Foer’s issues, in spite of the flaws wounding Here I Am, in spite of the fact that it’s at least 100 pages longer than it needs to be, when I closed the book for the last time, I was genuinely moved. It ends quietly with a scene that is inevitable, but no less excruciating for it.
