"Here I'am " by Jonathan Safran Foer

    Apparently it took Jonathan Safran Foer eleven years to bring this novel to fruition; at least, his last novel was published some eleven years ago. But the new novel, "Here I'am" is great tome, running, if I recollect rightly, up into 500 pages or so, and it has clearly been long in the making.
    What's it about? I hesitate to say that it is about everything connected with being a secular, or atheist, Jew in the United States, as this will then seem that my reading in recent months has focussed narrowly on the subject of Judaism, what with Finkler and Shylock. But it is much, much more than an exploration of Judaism--it is about a marriage that is splitting up, has split up, and started so successfully--the author switches without much of an indicator from present to future and past--confusingly so at times. It is about unbelievably precocious children; a bar-mitzvah speech by a thirteen-year-old boy reads like a rabbinical study. It's about a huge earthquake in the Middle East that comes close to destroying Israel, leading the Israeli Prime Minister to make a speech imploring Jews to come and defend Israel and an firebrand ayatollah urging Muslims to exterminate Jews.
     The principal characters--the married couple on their way to divorce--are Jacob and Julia, and they talk about their relationship endlessly, often in successive pages of dialogue that go, annoyingly, something like this:
    You should have said
     I said it twice.
    Twice was not enough when you didn't mean it.
     I did mean it.
     Jacob is constantly wrestling with who he is. One of the sons, Sam, is living a parallel life with an avatar on his computer. Julia cannot make up her mind whether to start an affair. The great-grandfather commits suicide, and there is a set-piece sermon of religious philosophy given by a rabbi at the funeral.
      I cannot do justice to the whole range of Foer's approaches to writing. He is clearly some sort of genius, but frankly it often seems as if he is just showing off--"look what I can do: if Portnoy could do page or two on masturbation, look how I can do a whole chapter."
      But one reviewer noted that the book was like a puppy...once you put it down, it is not long before you want to pick it up again, and I did hang in there until the end. 
      My partner, Joan, gave up half-way through. Her comment goes towards the old question: can you like a book when you do not like the principal characters?