





You can’t make a woman come just by looking at her. Or so it seemed we all agreed, until the arrival of Here I Am, Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel. This is a book about a marriage falling apart, but we are granted a single window into the lives of Julia and Jacob Bloch before they tie the knot. Once upon a time, they stayed in a nice Pennsylvania hotel, and Julia asked Jacob to stare into her vagina until, well, you know. “I have this desire,” she says, improbably, at the start of the routine. It is very important to her author that this all be framed as her choice.



Not too much later, Julia decides to masturbate with a stolen bespoke doorknob. She is reported to like “how the warm metal began to stick to her skin, to pull at it a little each time.” This is a novel that makes you puzzle over small questions, not least of them the science of this particular claim. How warm, exactly, would the metal have to be for skin to be “pulled” by it? How long, exactly, does warm water actually last as a lubricant, since we are told that this is all Julia uses?

Novelists get a pass on an odd erotic claim or two, if only because imagination ought to have some place in sex. But Foer’s idiosyncratic imaginings of female sexuality are made worse when accompanied by statements like, “Every architect has fantasies of building her own home, and so does every woman.” This is the only masturbation scene Julia gets. We are treated to Jacob’s fantasies at greater length, though his sexuality boils down to a penis fixation so strong that a minor subplot of the novel sees him wondering if Steven Spielberg is uncircumcised.

It’s hard to say whether Here I Am is serious about any of this. Foer splices these sex scenes into a bourgeois family fantasy, set in a bourgeois neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Jacob works in television, and Julia is an architect. Their children are precocious in a J.D. Salinger sort of way. The middle child, nine, is prone to observations like, “You realize that’s not even honey. That’s agave.” The twelve-year-old turns his talents to the manufacture of an “artificial vagina” from a toilet-paper roll, rubber bands, Saran Wrap, and maple syrup.

Eventually their family romance is disrupted: first by Jacob and Julia’s impending divorce, set off by her discovery that he has been sexting “one of the directors” at his prestige cable television show. Then a major earthquake hits Israel, because no Foer novel is complete without the functional use of a grave historical moment. In Everything Is Illuminated, it was the Holocaust; in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the September 11 attacks. Jacob spends several chapters mulling whether he will go to Israel to help with the relief effort. Ultimately, he doesn’t, and the disaster proves irrelevant to his personal drama. Slice out the newsworthy catastrophe and you’d have almost exactly the same book.