In a 1993 New Yorker review, John Updike eviscerated Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, calling it “an orgy of argumentation… which also has too many characters, numerous long speeches, and a vacillating, maddening hero who in the end shows the right stuff”. Jonathan Safran Foer’s third novel, Here I Am, bears more than a passing resemblance to Operation Shylock, and Updike’s waspish résumé of the earlier book’s faults might equally be applied to this hefty, often engaging, but ultimately flawed novel.

“When the destruction of Israel commenced, Isaac Bloch was weighing whether to kill himself or move to the Jewish Home.” So opens Here I Am, and the sentence is a neat encapsulation of the novel’s problematic oscillation between the personal and the political. It takes fully half the book before we finally get to the Israeli earthquake that unleashes a political crisis, and even here there’s the sense that the author would much rather be dwelling on the private vicissitudes of his hero, Jacob Bloch, than on the annihilation of the Jewish state.

Jacob is the grandson of Isaac, the son of rabid rightwing blogger Irv, husband to Julia and father of three sons – Sam, Max and Benjy. Jacob is in his early 40s, a scriptwriter for a popular television series who published several successful novels in his 20s and is now working on a screenplay for a show based upon his own family’s life. Jacob and Julia, after years of apparently happy marriage, have hit the rocks. The opening chapters of the book are penetrated by a series of filthy text messages, which we understand to have been sent by Jacob to a female colleague.

These early sections make gloriously painful reading. Safran Foer is brilliant on the quotidian tortures of marital discord, on the way that walls can suddenly spring up between people who’d thought they shared everything. “Julia could clip newborn fingernails with her teeth, and breast-feed while making a lasagne, and remove splinters without tweezers or pain, and have the kids begging for the lice comb, and compel sleep with a third-eye massage – but she had forgotten how to touch her husband. Jacob taught the kids the difference between farther and further, but no longer knew how to talk to his wife.”

Here I Am was, according to its pre-publication blurb, “10 years in the making”, and a lot has changed in that time. Gone are the charming, precocious narrators of Safran Foer’s earlier novels, gone are many of the postmodern pyrotechnics and magic-realist jeux of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, both of which were published when Safran Foer was in his 20s. Gone also is Nicole Krauss, to whom Safran Foer was married from 2004 to 2014 – the starriest of Brooklyn’s literary couples. This is a serious, grownup novel, written on the other side of great pain. The implicit parallel in the book between personal catastrophe and political crisis – between the break-up of the Bloch marriage and the earthquake and subsequent Arab-Israeli stand-off – might at first appear absurd, hubristic. That the reader just about accepts the comparison is testament to the coruscating acuity of Safran Foer’s prose, the withering and unblinking gaze he turns upon a relationship gone sour.

Jacob Bloch’s midlife snafu is compounded by a crisis of religious identity initiated by the situation in Israel. Here I Am is divided into three broad sections. The first shows us Jacob and Julia as they drift apart, dealing all the while with their incontinent, lovable dog, Argus; with their precocious, demanding children. It’s like a Jewish-American episode of Outnumbered, with, glowering beneath, the real agony of Jacob’s betrayal, of Julia’s pain.

The second, a shorter segment, brings us a white-knuckle rolling news feed of the earthquake. We have long speeches from the prime minister of Israel, from the ayatollah, an escalating sense of panic as the environmental catastrophe unravels into a political crisis. The section ends with Israel’s government deciding to issue a call for the world’s Jews to bolster the country’s population, because “The president of the United States could watch eight million Israeli Jews be slaughtered, but not one hundred thousand American Jews”.

The final section sees Jacob struggling with his position as a shrimp-eating agnostic “in the same river of history” as the Jews suffering in Israel, wondering whether his father is right to say that “the answer is the same to every question about us: because the world hates Jews”. Tamir, Jacob’s cousin, is visiting from Israel when the earthquake hits, a hard-nosed pragmatist who gives voice to Jacob’s anxieties about the authenticity of his identity as a Jew. “Every year you end your seder with ‘Next year in Jersusalem’,” Tamir says, “and every year you choose to celebrate your seder in America.” Jacob recognises that American Jews may be too soft for the battle ahead, Jews who “adjusted their aviator glasses with only the muscles in their faces while parsing Fugazi lyrics while pushing in the lighters of their hand-me-down Volvo wagons… They were miserable at sports, but great at fantasy sports. They avoided fights, but sought arguments. They were the children and grandchildren of immigrants, of survivors. They were defined by, and proud of, their flagrant weakness.”

Over the course of this third section, Safran Foer, with no little subtlety, shows us how the crisis in the Middle East is experienced by Jacob and by extension by American Jews. Whereas the newsreel passage comes at us furious, breathless, insistent, the earthquake and its aftermath are now presented as filtered, etiolated by the interjection of domestic crises, familial responsibilities. Tamir, as the man of action, is desperate to return to Israel; Jacob is paralysed by indecision. We listen to a lot of speeches in this later section – the zingy dialogue of the opening passages has been replaced by entrenched position-taking. It’s admirable and thought-provoking, but something is sacrificed in allowing Jacob’s dilemma to remain unresolved for so long. What might have been a brave and bravura ending is allowed to fizzle out. The political winnows down to the personal, and the novel finishes with Jacob, like David Lurie in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, deciding that kindness to animals might be all a human can aspire to in a frantic and fractured world.

Here I Am is a surprisingly old-fashioned, realist novel of ideas, and sees Safran Foer moving away from the playfulness and experimentation of his earlier works. If he doesn’t go quite as far as Roth in Operation Shylock and give his protagonist his own name, there are numerous Ben Lerner-ish hints that we should identify Jacob with his creator. Here I Am is the lament of one lost in the wilderness of midlife, a Generation X-er who finds being grown up more frightening, less enchanted, than he’d been led to believe it would be. The novel’s title refers to Abraham’s reassuring words to Isaac as he leads him to the place of sacrifice, but it also speaks to the fraught questions of identity that propel the book’s narrative. As Jacob says, despairingly, towards the end of the novel: “He was a father to the boys, a son to his father, a husband to his wife, a friend to his friends, but to whom was he himself?”

Here I Am is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). Click here to order a copy for £16.40