I have just read Here I Am. It is the story of a family, or rather of a marriage, or rather of a man - Jacob Bloch. He is solipsistic (kind of). Trying to be good (kind of). Failing (kind of).

I don't mind that the novel is long, but I do mind the reasons for its length. Yes, okay, the author has a great facility with language - or a good Thesaurus. But having found multiple ways to say essentially the same thing he puts them all in, as if allowing us to make the choice of epithet or as if he wasn't sure which might be best. That adds length.

Then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story - and Jewishness has an ancient, self-obsessed (though admittedly self-critical) relationship to itself of mythical inclinations, Jonathan Safran Foer reaches for repetition: in paragraph structure, in sentence structure (as above), and in emotion. It's a bit like reading a folk tale, which perhaps we are in its modern American-Jewish incarnation. This too adds length, and ultimately predictability.

In the end, though, for all the tussling with his wife, his relationship to his Jewishness and to Israel, and with his diminishing sense of worth in a too-comfortable existence that he suspects has little heft, Jacob comes across as more schmaltzy than his creator can have intended, all the while filtered through a knowing irony.

Perhaps I am just jaded by yet another identity novel. Is there nothing else to write about these days?

And yet. I did read it to the very end.