The Finkler Question was Howard Jacobson’s eleventh novel. He has continued to publish a new work every other year (or thereabouts) since his first book Coming from Behind came out in 1983. The choice of The Finkler Question as winner of the 2010 Booker Prize was not particularly controversial (compared to many previous awards) – the field was strong, including works by Peter Carey, Damon Galgut and Andrea Levy, but it had been well reviewed and strongly tipped to win. Reviewers compared it favourably to Philip Roth and even Lewis Carroll! It was however unusual amongst Booker winners in that it was – ostensibly – a comic novel, the first of its kind to win the Booker since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils in 1986.
I appreciate ‘comic novel’ is a fairly loose category. In a 2015 lecture Jacobson himself gave to the Royal Society of Literature he offered these tips on how to write (and therefore what constitutes) a comic novel:
“Don’t try to be funny. The best comedy arises out of an embarrassment of seriousness.
Don’t give characters funny names. (Dickens used them all up)
Underwear isn’t funny. Neither are exclamation marks.
Writing about sex altogether is tricky. But inexplicitness is best, except when it isn’t. Do remember, though, that it takes refinement to be gross. (Was Jacobson following his own advice in his book The Act of Love which preceded The Finkler Question? Publishers Weekly described it as a “naughtily erudite” novel in which he “explores the nature of the erotic” in which a character is found “letching after two underage girls while attending the funeral of a man whose wife he had seduced” and in which the main characters wife ’embraces the infidelity foisted on her with gusto, relishing her thrice-weekly assignations and, after much persuasion, titillating her curious husband with details of their intimacies.’? Doesn’t look like it.)
Don’t be upbeat or feel-good, and don’t invite your readers to find you or your characters incorrigible.
Assume you are writing a tragedy. If your novel is any good that’s precisely what it will turn out to be.
Don’t consent to be called a comic novelist. It’s a tautology.”
A lot of these pointers are things to avoid rather than to do, and Jacobson was almost certainly trying to be witty rather than offering a serious guide to writing a comic novel, but at the same time the tragic element of The Finkler Question is central to the narrative and one that I will return to.
The connection between Jacobson and Kingsley Amis is deeper than their both having won the Booker. In my view many of Jacobson’s works bear a strong resemblance to those of Amis senior. His leading male characters are generally irritable and world weary, with an internal monologue revealing someone kicking against the pricks. These characters frequently seem an avatar for the novelist themselves, revealing their frustrations with the modern world and women in particular, especially those who prove resistance to their late middle-aged charms. Amis was notoriously misogynistic, but there are similar traits in Jacobson’s work. In No More Mr Nice Guy for example, the wife of his central character writes “feministical-erotic novels” and in Redback, Jacobson’s third novel, misogyny is front and central. Both men also experimented with writing dystopian novels – The Alteration (Amis) and J (Jacobson).
What does it mean to be Jewish? More specifically what does it mean to be Jewish in the UK in this century? That is The Finkler Question.
Jacobson’s central character, Julian Treslove is mugged one night. He is convinced his attacker calls him a Jew during the attack. Though some of his friends are Jewish, Treslove is not. Following the attack he becomes increasingly obsessed with what being Jewish means, in this time and place. For Treslove this isn’t a religious quest but rather a cultural one. He wants to understand the intricacies and precise nature of British Jewish life.
One of Treslove’s friends Libor Sevcik, is an elderly widower who was once a teacher specializing in Czech history. Treslove and Sam Finkler, the third member of the group, were two of his students. All of the book’s characters have complex identities – Sevcik had a second improbable career as a Hollywood gossip columnist. Finkler is a successful television personality and author. Treslove is a casual anti-Semite – despite having Jewish friends he really has no understanding of Jewish culture and thinks ““Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew — small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes.”
Treslove turns the word “Finkler” into a private synonym for “Jew” and begins to anatomise what he thinks as ‘Finkler’ behaviours, traits and customs, wondering to what extent he shares these characteristics.
Jacobson writes passionately about the Middle East through his complex characters. The New York Times’s review of the novel claims that the novel “does a painful, bravura job of presenting a full spectrum of Jewish attitudes about the Middle East”. Perhaps, although I don’t think Jacobson makes any serious attempt to underplay his own views:
“By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare? I am an Englishman who loves England, but do you suppose that it too is not a racist country? Do you know of any country whose recent history is not blackened by prejudice and hate against somebody? So what empowers racists in their own right to sniff out racism in others? Only from a world from which Jews believe they have nothing to fear will they consent to learn lessons in humanity. Until then, the Jewish state’s offer of safety to Jews the world over yes, Jews first – while it might not be equitable cannot sanely be constructed as racist. I can understand why a Palestinian might say it feels racist to him, though he too inherits a history of disdain for people of other persuasions to himself, but not you, madam, since you present yourself as a bleeding-heart, conscience-pricked representative of the very Gentile world from which Jews, through no fault of their own, have been fleeing for centuries…”
This is that difficult beast, a deadly serious comic novel. Wry smiles are probably the most you will get in the way of comedy or amusement and the main characters are hard to love, but the insights into Jewish life in 21st Century Britain are important and make the novel worth reading in themselves. I doubt if any minds will have been changed by the analysis of the ‘Finkler’ question but that obviously was never really the point. In trying to be both amusing and serious the novel runs the risk, like all others of the genre, of being neither. I think it will be obvious by now that I am still not sure whether it succeeds or not – but that indecision is OK, I don’t pretend these reviews are final judgments on what I read. The 2.8 (out of 5) score on Goodreads from the 2,000+ reviews suggest I’m not the only one with mixed or indecisive feelings about it!
The Reading Bug 