HERE I AM

By Jonathan Safran Foer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

571 pp., $28

Oh, Jonathan Safran Foer, I hate to sound like a Jewish grandmother in one of your novels, but why can’t you be more like that nice Michael Chabon? “Here I Am’’ has all the elements: Jews and Big Questions; astute sociocultural observations and closely drawn characters; perfectly turned sentences (at least some of them); and a creative alternative-history plot device. Yet unlike Chabon, who crafts these elements into masterful narratives, you seem determined not to tell a compelling story.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some good things here. Your plot device, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake in Israel that sparks the ultimate Arab-Israeli war, is genius, as is your development of its sadly plausible consequences. Yet after hinting at “the destruction of Israel’’ in your first sentence, it takes you nearly 250 pages to get there. Even then you focus less on the ensuing events than on your neurotic Jewish anti-hero Jacob Bloch’s significantly less interesting feelings about them.

The real topic of “Here I Am’’ is the plodding, circuitous journey toward the divorce of Jacob and Julia Bloch: writer and architect; parents of Sam, Max, and Benjy; possessors of a $7,000 organic mattress, nostalgic memories of early love and parenthood, and plenty of middle-aged angst. Jacob is the fun parent; Julia the responsible one. Jacob can’t stop joking, to the point of Woody Allen-esque shtick; Julia is serious, to the point of grim. Jacob has bought a second cellphone on which to sext a colleague; Julia designs fantasy houses with only one bedroom. Both masturbate (a subject in which your interest borders on Portnoy-esque), and both fear they were responsible for the long-ago accident that mangled Sam’s hand, but neither discusses either with the other. In short, “They’d lost their way’’ and just “want to get back to happiness.’’

Fortunately, there are more compelling Blochs, even if they too skirt the edge of stereotype. Irv, Jacob’s father, is a right-wing blogger with a soft spot for his family, except, apparently, his father, lonely Holocaust survivor Isaac. Skeptical Sam, tormentedly adolescent yet acutely perceptive, wants nothing to do with his bar mitzvah even as his avatar Samanta builds an elaborate teen dream synagogue in the absorbing digital world of Other Life. Max is the family’s compass of compassion, while Benjy dramatizes the realizations, fears, and habits of young childhood (you nail your milieu with his insistence on eating “what might be called unrealized foods: frozen vegetables . . . uncooked oatmeal, unboiled ramen noodles, dough’’). Meanwhile, the strength and insight of Jacob’s blustering Israeli cousin Tamir suggest that Jacob may not be the only Jewish writer who clings to a romantic myth of Israeli masculinity.

As the Blochs navigate the potential collapse of Sam’s bar mitzvah, Jacob and Julia’s marriage, and the State of Israel, “Here I Am’’ meanders along via internal monologues, lists, speeches, gnomic pronouncements, Chinese boxes of secrets and lies, and endless conversations — all of varying degrees of interest. While a list of places Isaac has lived is a virtuoso short-form biography, the contents of Jacob and Julia’s medicine cabinet and mail are banal signifiers of the obvious. “We discuss too much in this family,’’ says Jacob, and unfortunately he’s right. Indeed, whenever something is about to actually happen — when Jacob decides to go to Israel with Tamir to fight in the war or we are about to learn more about Sam’s hand — you swerve away from action back to rumination and disquisition, as if you are determined to tell not show.

Of course you may be enacting your apparent answer to “Here I Am’s’’ Big Question: What does it mean to be a Jew, especially an American Jew, as the last Holocaust survivors and Israel’s moral luster simultaneously fade away? You ladle on copious amounts of familiar contemporary Judaic Americana — rote funeral rituals and groaning shiva boards, blasphemously horny Hebrew school students and ambivalence about Israel — and your characters are preoccupied with the idea of being present embodied in your titular quotation of Abraham’s assertion at the sacrifice of Isaac, “Here I am.’’ But ultimately, being Jewish seems to rest on language, argument, and trying to have it both ways: As Sam puts it in his bar mitzvah speech, “To be and not to be. That is the answer.’’ This may be Talmudic — at Isaac’s funeral, the rabbi asserts that “Judaism has a special relationship with words’’ — yet it also recalls Jacob’s feeble excuse for his extramarital sexts: “It was only words.’’

In the decade since your last novel, Jonathan, you’ve kept yourself in the public eye with earnest explorations of vegetarianism; an expensive house in Park Slope; e-mails with Natalie Portman about freedom, wonder, hamsters, and garbage; and your own divorce. “Here I Am’’ was your chance to prove that you’re not just extremely precious and incredibly self-absorbed. Unfortunately, it’s a lost opportunity.

HERE I AM

By Jonathan Safran Foer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 571 pp., $28

Rebecca Steinitz is the author of “Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary.’’ She can be reached at rsteinitz@gmail.com.