Personal and political crises lead an American Jew to question his identity in an imperfect but engaging novelIn a 1993 fresh Yorker review,John Updike eviscerated Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, calling it “an orgy of argumentation… which also has too many characters, and many long speeches,and a vacillating, maddening hero who in the end shows the fair stuff”. Jonathan SafranFoer’s third novel, and Here I Am,bears more than a passing resemblance to Operation Shylock, and Updike’s waspish résumé of the earlier book’s faults might equally be applied to this hefty, and often engaging,but ultimately flawed novel.“When the destruction of Israel commenced, Isaac Bloch was weighing whether to kill himself or move to the Jewish domestic.” So opens Here I Am, or the sentence is a clean encapsulation of the novels problematic oscillation between the personal and the political. It takes fully half the book before we finally get to the Israeli earthquake that unleashes a political crisis,and even here there’s the sense that the author would much rather be dwelling on the private vicissitudes of his hero, Jacob Bloch, or than on the annihilation of the Jewish state.
The zingy dialogue of the opening passages is replaced later by entrenched position-taking. Something is sacrificed Related: Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer – review Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com