Your story in this week’s issue, “Maybe It Was the Distance,” is drawn from your new novel, “Here I Am,” which will come out in September, and it deals with the relationship over decades between two cousins, one American and one Israeli. In the book, of course, many other things happen, and Jacob’s relationship with Tamir is, for the most part, secondary (or tertiary) to the action. Is it strange for you to see that element of the book isolated in this way?
Quite strange. So much of the work of writing a book is striking balances. That is far more difficult than composing. As I read over the proofs, I felt pangs of regret that the reader wouldn’t have the context of the rest of the book. The material that comprises this excerpt is spread out over three or four hundred pages in the novel. While Israel features prominently in the novel, the book is not about Israel. It’s about home. The central drama of the book is domestic, and unfolds largely in Jacob’s kitchen in Washington, D.C.
You write about how differently Tamir and Jacob grew up—how Tamir’s life in Israel forced him to be worldly and mature when Jacob was still worrying about where to hang posters in his dorm room. Yet Tamir’s ambitions—to have money, big apartments, big-breasted girlfriends, talking toilets, etc.—are mostly puerile and superficial. Whose upbringing seems “superior” to you?
Why are you so quick to dismiss a talking toilet as superficial? Doesn’t it really depend on what the toilet is talking about? And isn’t the desire to be in better communication with the world—be it your next-door neighbor, your North Korean pen pal, or your shitter—inherently moral?
I don’t know that either upbringing is superior. But then, I’m a parental relativist. Not because I don’t judge the utterly foolish and destructive choices I witness other parents making, but because I don’t want my own foolish and destructive choices judged.
In the story, you play around with stereotypes—of Israeli Jews, of American Jews, and others. Are you concerned that you’ll be accused of caricature?
I’m not at all concerned about being accused of caricature. I’m far more concerned that a reader won’t see that I was caricaturing. The book often takes a humorous path to a serious destination. The relationship between American Jews and Israeli Jews is profoundly complicated, fraught, and significant. But the best way for me to explore that is through fiction, and, while this book is more socially realistic than my previous books, it certainly departs from reality on occasion.
“Here I Am” is your first novel in more than ten years. Were you working on it for all that time? Do you see it as a departure from your first two?
My older son was born right around the time I finished my previous novel. That’s no coincidence. I devoted myself to my children, very much at the expense of my writing, although it never felt like a sacrifice, a compromise, or even a trade. It felt like the best way to spend my finite time. It’s not that I chose to devote less of myself to the kids, in order to write this book. They have simply needed (and wanted) less as they’ve grown.
I do see this book as a departure—it is more political, less flamboyant, more dialogue-driven, less fanciful. I believe it is more mature. But then, the last decade of life was a departure for me. And I’ve certainly had to do a great deal of maturing.
The book imagines a natural disaster in Israel that has radical political ramifications. It also follows the intimate trajectory of a struggling marriage. Were both of those narrative lines in play from the beginning?
They were both in play since quite close to the beginning. But I actually had two distinct projects going at once: a story about a calamitous earthquake in the Middle East, and one about an infidelity. They came together and, in the process, changed a great deal. What the central events of each narrative strand have in common is that they force latent paradoxes to the fore, and force their participants into moments of choice.
