Jonathan Safran Foer
NOVEMBER 10, 2016
Following the election as US president of Donald J. Trump readers dumbfounded by the result may be interested in this interview with leading American novelist, Jonathan Safran Foer, which was conducted in August by Rosemary Goring during this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. It was first published in the Herald.
It’ll have to do,” says Jonathan Safran Foer, entering a windowless tent the size of a potting shed where we are to conduct this interview. Ahead of his appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival we have been given this secluded space, where light filters through canvas, and queues snake noisily past. It’s like cowering under a sheet on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of Sauchiehall Street.
One of America’s most fêted novelists, in person Safran Foer is nothing like his books. He does not froth with words, nor does he turn the air electric with energy. Instead, the slightly built, gently spoken, exceedingly polite grandson of Holocaust survivors is measured and calm. The 39-year-old, who lives in New York and has sons aged 10 and seven, was amicably divorced from the novelist Nicole Krauss in 2014. He is one of the most high-profile literary figures of our times, even though his latest novel, ‘Here I Am’, is only his third. His fizzing debut, ‘Everything Is Illuminated’, depicted his fictional namesake trying to find the Ukrainian woman who had saved his Jewish grandfather’s life. This was followed by ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’, about 9/11, written from a precocious child’s perspective. As with his first, it received as much criticism as praise.
‘Here I Am’ is equally likely to divide opinion, but it is unarguably Safran Foer’s most substantial and impressive work yet. It has the emotional depth and dramatic maturity of a writer gathering his powers, and it seems he too can sense it. “It feels like a very personal expression,; he says. In conversation with his editor earlier that day, he had admitted, “I don’t feel I’ve got any more innermost self than this. This is as inner as I get.”
Set in modern-day Washington, its central character is Jacob, an anxious, constipated, 40-something writer for television, father of three sons, grandson of a Holocaust survivor, whose marriage to his architect wife Julia is in a nose dive. It opens on the eve of their eldest child Sam’s bar mitzvah, and takes place against an increasingly sinister backdrop as Israel’s West Bank is devastated first by earthquake and then by impending war. When diaspora Jews are begged to return to help, Jacob’s Israeli cousin tries to convince him that defending their spiritual homeland is his duty. Meanwhile forces hostile to Israel, among them Hezbollah and Islamic State, join forces for attack.
When I remark that it is a tremendously Jewish novel, Safran Foer laughs.
“I don’t deny it, but I’ve been really surprised by how many people say it’s a really Jewish novel. Is it? It has a lot of cultural specificity. I guess it’s a little bit like saying to me, you’re a very Jewish person. I feel very fluent in this language, this cultural language, so to me it’s like that joke about the fish. Two fish meet up and one of them says, “The water’s pretty warm today,” and the other fish says, “What’s water?” “
This is charmingly expressed, but disconcerting. Even more so is when he disavows any political intent with a novel that bristles with inflammatory subjects. A coldness enters his voice as he distances himself from such a purpose. “It would be disingenuous to say it wasn’t also born out of some political instincts or my own feelings about the Middle East, but I wrote the book as a novelist, not as a commentator or an activist of any kind.”
The crux of ‘Here I Am’ – which is what Abraham says to God when called on to sacrifice his son – is the conflict when people are torn between who they are and what they must do.
“Basically, where does one locate one’s identity? For what are we present without reservation, without conditions? … One cannot be an unconditionally present parent while being an unconditionally present professional in the world, they are just in conflict. A lot of people find a paradox of identity in being married while being an individual in the world. Some people find a paradox between religious values and secular values… For most of us most of the time it doesn’t really matter. It’s on the back burner. … Sometimes for some people a moment of crisis will arise that compels choice. This book is organised around crises that force choices. Do I stay in the marriage or do I go? Do I go to Israel and fight or admit that Israel is dispensable to me? I find that pretty exciting.”
He glances at the flapping canvas walls around us, ignoring the wildebeests stomping past in clogs. “The book is not making any one of those cases, but it tries to present a chorus of cases, not in an anthropological way but in a literary way. I’ve always wanted to write not an ambitious book but an irrepressible book. You can love it or you can hate it but you can’t really be indifferent to it. Because indifference is not only the enemy of literature but of life.”
Safran Foer loves Marmite, but has never heard it used to describe someone who sharply divides opinion. “God it really does apply, unfortunately.”
For a man who describes himself, broadly speaking, as a secular Jew, his heritage runs deep. So does he feel a pull to Israel, like his fictional characters? “It’s a place I do feel a special connection to. I do love being there.”
Why is that? “It’s a singular place in terms of the intersection of history and modernity. It’s an undeniably spiritual place, and I deny spirituality whenever I have a chance to. But I also do feel connected to it personally. I am, like it or not, choose it or not, a continuation of an extraordinarily long tradition, a member of a people who have historically always felt a particular connection to that place. The nature of connection has obviously changed over time and will continue to change. I also feel some connection which I feel as much as a question mark as I do an exclamation point. It’s something that I wrestle with.”
As his new novel shows, Safran Foer revels in debate and discussion, and cannot settle for certainty. Yet on one subject he seems oddly sure. ‘Here I Am’ talks of global threats to Jews, and I wonder if, as in Philip Roth’s ‘The Plot Against America’, there is any fear of what might happen to Jews in America were it to have a President Trump.
He smiles. “With a president like Trump all bets would be off… It wouldn’t be good for anybody, including people who think it would be good for them. But I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely, verging on impossible, to imagine that he would win.”
There was similar complacency in Britain before the Brexit vote, leaving some of us sceptical about such assertions.
“Look, his existence is scary enough. Really, he doesn’t have to win to be scary. I hope it [the election] will be a revelatory moment in the other sense. I hope and I imagine it will be a massive landslide and it will be a reaffirmation of what America is actually like.
“Could a European country have elected a black president? Maybe but probably unlikely. Clearly Europe is much better at electing women leaders than America, but America is a divided country and a divided world…. In America, there’s this increasing political dichotomy. Unlike in a lot of the rest of the world, the demographics are hopeful. Everything is skewing liberal, whereas the impression of Europe from America is the opposite, that things are beginning to skew to the right. And certainly in the Middle East everything is skewing to the right.”
It is unsettling that a novelist who can foresee the possibility of violent upheaval in Israel is unable or unwilling to imagine a political earthquake in his own country. Let us pray he is right to dismiss the idea, and that Mr Trump will never take occupation of the White house and be able to say, Here I Am.
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