Tag Archives: Howard Jacobson

Book review

J by Howard Jacobson, 2014

J, shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize, is set in a dystopian(ish) future after a catastrophic event known only as ‘WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED’. Later in the novel different variants of this expression are used, such as WHAT HAPPENED (that is, without the qualifier) indicating the speaker’s distance from the orthodox view of this event. Precisely what ‘the event’ was is never made explicit, but enough is revealed towards the end of the novel to suggest that it was a mass killing of a minority in society in which ordinary citizens participated. Several decades have passed since this event, but society is still haunted by it, seeking ways of restoring balance to an increasingly violent and disordered world.

The central narrative of J is on the surface a traditional romance. Kevern, a woodworker, and Ailinn, an artist, begin a rather sweet love affair. Kevern is socially isolated and finds it hard to make friendships. He is rather neurotic and exhibits symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder – for example he repeatedly returns to his front door to make sure it is locked and that his hallway is arranged as he needs it to be. The reader comes to realise that he has been taught to do this by his parents as a way of ensuring that he can tell if his house has been broken into. In other words it is a security measure, although precisely who or what he needs to be worried about is initially unclear. Kevern was also taught by his father to place two fingers over his lips when using any word beginning with the letter J. This we can conclude was a way of training his son never to acknowledge his Jewish identity – the words Jew and Jewish are never used in the novel and illustrate how Jewishness has been effectively extinguished by WHAT HAPPENED. The letter J becomes in the novel a symbol of the near complete erasure of Jewish people in this society and also points to the hidden identity of any Jewish survivors. The novel’s true title is actually the letter “J” with two lines struck through it – this double-crossed “J” (see above) evokes the anti-Semitic trope of the “double-crossing Jew,” serving as a visual reminder of the deep-seated prejudice that exists even in a society that claims to have addressed this prejudice. Ironically the government has since WHAT HAPPENED forced all citizens to take Jewish-sounding surnames in a twisted attempt to illustrate that anti-Semitism no longer exists. But this attempt to rewrite history and deny the existence of anti-Semitism is not working – society remains violent and troubled. We eventually come to realise that Kevern and Ailinn’s relationship has been engineered as a social experiment to see if the reintroduction of Jews to society may help rebuild society by providing a scapegoat for society’s ills. When they find this out the impact on them is devastating.

Jews are not the only people who have seen their identity reduced to simplified markers in this society: “A compliant society meant that every section of it consented with gratitude – the gratitude of the providentially spared – to the principle of group aptitude. People of Afro-Caribbean origin were suited by temperament and physique to entertainment and athletics, and so they sang and sprinted. People originally from the Indian subcontinent, electronically gifted as though by nature, undertook to ensure no family was without a functioning utility phone. What was left of the Polish community plumbed, what was left of the Greek smashed plates.“

The publisher of J compared the novel to the dystopias written by Orwell and Huxley. So far there is no evidence that the comparison has stood the test of time – for example J has an average score on Goodreads of just under 3 (on a scale of 1-5). I understand the reservations many reviewers have expressed about J on this site and elsewhere. Jacobson really makes the reader work hard – the point of view narration from members of a society where forgetting WHAT HAPPENED is a national preoccupation means we are only given glimpses of the past and have to piece things together slowly. (The ending of the novel is also unforgivably bad, but we shouldn’t define a novel just by how it ends). This is a thought-provoking novel that I suspect will be read in years to come when other Booker prize shortlisted novels have long been forgotten. It is hard for me as a non-Jewish person to fully appreciate the issues Jacobson discusses, but I believe that this portrait of being Jewish in a society in which the whole concept of Judaism has been effectively eradicated will resonate with many Jewish people.

J by Howard Jacobson, 2014

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Book review

Coming from Behind by Howard Jacobson, 1983

One of the most tired propositions about novel writing is ‘write about what you know’. In this his first novel, Howard Jacobson, stretched that saying to its limit. Jacobson is a Jewish man from Manchester who studied English at Cambridge, followed by a teaching post in Australia, then came back to teach at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. In this 1983 novel his protagonist is Sefton Goldberg, a Jewish man from Manchester who studied English at Cambridge, taught in Australia, before coming back to teach in England at ‘Wrottesley’ Polytechnic. It is hard not to see this novel therefore as at least in part autobiographical, albeit with lots of dramatic exaggeration. The novel’s title is a fairly crude pun – it opens with a scene of Sefton having sex with a student in his office, something he seems to think is one of the perks of his job. But he is not enjoying himself – he can’t stop wondering whether he has properly locked his office door, recalling a similar incident when he taught in Australia – obviously a common occurence.

Jacobson came late to the ‘campus novel’ genre – arguably Kingsley Amis kicked this off in the 1950’s with Lucky Jim, followed by Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man in 1975, and the same year David Lodge’s Changing Places. Academia in all these novels is not portrayed as a privileged place of learning but instead as a wholly depressing experience. These fictional universities are staffed by grumpy, largely male, amoral lecturers overwhelmed by the non-academic requirements of academia.

The novel has very little of what could be called a plot. Sefton is divorcing his wife, but she never appears. His colleagues and students are all lightly sketched, one-dimensional characters with amusing idiosyncrasies such as the professor who specialises in “all the twentieth century poets whose first or last names were Tom or Thomas”. The exception to this beige brigade is the misogynistic portrait of the teacher of creative studies, Cora Peck, defined by her unconventional outfits – blue cowboy boots, white jump suits and black leather jackets. Inevitably Sefton attempts to seduce Cora but surprisingly she rejects him. I say surprisingly because the general rule of thumb in novels written by male novelists of this era is that no matter how clumsy, awkward and unappealing the male protagonists are, they are nevertheless unaccountably irresistible to almost all female characters (see for example pretty much anything ever written by Kingsley Amis.) That rule is broadly followed by Jacobson in this novel, with Cora forming the sole exception. Cora has had a number of her works accepted by a publisher, which gives Sefton another reason to despise her.

An implausible ‘twinning’ deal with the local football club in which some of the departments are going to be moved into the football stadium is introduced as a plot development – but unfortunately it makes no sense, football clubs being notoriously short on classrooms, offices and lecture halls, and is never taken seriously even within the confines of the novel. When he is not having sex with his students Sefton spends his time applying for any and all jobs broadly connected to academia, with the sole objective of getting out of Wrottesley. A Cambridge college invites him for an interview, which provides the opportunity for a set piece college dinner scene in which Sefton feels totally out of place, and where he is inevitably propositioned by the female Director of Studies.

Coming from Behind is the broadest of comedies, more Carry on Teaching than Lucky Jim. There are a series of comic set piece scenes such as when Sefton is confronted by a group of Geography lecturers, outraged that he has parked in their section of the Polytechnic’s awful car park. Throughout Jacobson relentlessly focuses on Sefton’s Jewish identity. Everything he does is seen through this lens. It is mentioned on almost every page, with long meditations on what it means for Sefton to be a Jewish man in education, at Cambridge, making love, discussing sport, walking in the countryside, being ignorant of fishing (“Being Jewish, Sefton didn’t know much about the names or breeds or needs of fish. (p.24)) and so on ad nauseum. At times Sefton specifically resents the fact that he is not being discriminated against because of his Jewish identity! That’s obviously not to say that one’s heritage and religion is not important, but when it is the only defining characteristic of an individual, the only way of looking at and experiencing the world, it gets a bit wearing.

There are moments of bad taste in the novel and language used that was common in the 80’s but today considered offensive. This is just one more barrier to squeezing any pleasure or enjoyment out of this book. I took a quick look at Amazon to see if it is still in print – it is – and while there two reviews jumped out at me. The first was the bizarre “the wife liked it” (!!) but the other was I think on the nose in describing the novel as “spiteful and intellectually snobbish”.

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Coming from Behind by Howard Jacobson, 1983

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Book review

I know my review of Jacobson’s The Finkler Question was probably a bit harsh, so I thought I would give him another try. I’ve had Redback on my book shelves, sitting unread and unloved for goodness knows how long, so it seemed an obvious supplemental read to Finkler.

Jacobson isn’t alone amongst novelists for mining his past for material in his early novels. Redback‘s central character, Karl Leon Forelock comes from the northern English town of Partington, the wettest spot in Europe (Jacobson grew up in Prestwich which is in Greater Manchester). Partington is the most depressing, crime ridden and deprived town in the universe – Jacobson obviously didn’t have particularly happy memories of Prestwich! Forelock somehow manages to gain a place at Cambridge, eventually graduating with a double starred first in Moral Decencies from Malapert college. (Jacobson went to Downing College where he studied English, and emerged with the slightly less impressive 2:2). After university Forelock secures funding from the CIA to go to Australia. It’s never clear what he is supposed to be doing for the CIA there – there’s no-one in particular to spy on, and all he seems to do is go to parties. The publisher’s summary of the novel says his role is to “teach the Australians how to live” which is meaningless surely? Anyway, it gives Jacobson a reason to take his character to Australia where Jacobson himself spent three years teaching, and this is where the majority of the events of the novel take place.

The novel’s descriptions of the Australian wildlife and way of life is tired and cliche-ridden – we know Australian abounds with dangerous and poisonous animals. Australians probably wouldn’t mind the novel’s portrayal of themselves as heavy drinkers and uncultured but again no cliche is left on the shelf. As the novel’s publisher puts it: “Leon quickly discovers that there are some natives who believe that they have an education to pass on in return. But it is at the hands of the women in Australia that Leon receives his most painful, and on occasions his most pleasurable, lessons.” Which sounds awful doesn’t it? They are trying to promote the novel as a sex comedy, and while there are element of ‘Carry On Down Under’ about the whole affair (Forelock has a prolonged menage a trois with a pair of enthusiastic Australian synchronised swimmers for example) the comedy has not aged well.
Throughout the novel the narrator (Forelock) refers every few pages to his having received a bite from a Redback spider that drastically changes his character and outlook on life (although sadly not his attitudes towards women):

“in a foul, dilapidated bush privy, way up in the Bogong high plains, the Redback sucks her teeth and waits her turn.“

This bite only comes at the very end of the novel, and it’s not clear why it changes his character, in what way, and why the reader should care. If this is symbolism for a traumatic and transformative experience then I am not sure what it stands for, but by this point I didn’t care either.

The blurb to the Bantam Press hardback edition of Redback claims that “the author is the most devastatingly funny novelist writing in English today” Not “one of the most devastatingly funny writers” but “the most devastating”, and not just of English writers but of those “writing in English”. That was a bold claim given that in 1987 when this novel was first published Douglas Adams was writing the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Terry Pratchett was writing The Colour of Magic, and Stella Gibbons, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Sue Townsend to name just a few were still active. Kingsley Amis to whom Jacobson owes the most obvious debt had just won the Booker Prize for The Old Devils. If that hyperbole wasn’t enough, the blurb back page also quotes the Sunday Times as describing Jacobson as “the most dangerously funny writer in the English language”, a quote that is still used on the book’s listing on Amazon and elsewhere to this day, although I wasn’t able to track it down to source. I know ‘quite amusing but not laugh out loud funny’ wouldn’t have sold as many books, but it would have been a lot more honest.

One of the principles of comic writing Jacobson outlined in his speech to the Royal Literary Society I referenced in my previous post was not to give your characters ‘funny’ names, because Dickens had used them all. This was obviously a lesson learnt from experience, because almost all the characters in Redback have unfunny funny names: Montserrat Tomlinsom, Vance Kelpie, Hartley Quibell, Ruddles Carmody, etc, etc. The comedy is also very crude at times, not least in the novel’s opening anecdote when undergraduate Forelock meets “a wholesome young Australian girl with powerful mandibles and an MA in fine art“. They hit it off, but in his rooms later that evening, “after a heavy supper of pasta and fish … the chemistry decides to play up” and the sex misfires. “He falls asleep on his back with a fart and sweats and snores“. He wakes in the morning, “relieved to discover that the girl has gone; but an odd feeling, an unaccustomed tingling of the skin, a sensation of discomfort and unease around the heart, causes him, still on his back, to cast an eye over his person, whereupon he finds that she has left a little memento of herself – a Freudian gift, hard, compact, warm, in its own way perfectly formed, a faecal offering smelling of fish and pasta (of tagliatelle marinara) – nestling amongst the soft hairs of his chest, only inches from his gaping mouth.”

If you find that funny, Redback might be the novel for you. But I found it entirely forgettable – I only finished a few days ago but in the course of writing this review had to go back and check how it ends (did I really finish it?) only to find that it doesn’t really end at all, it just peters out. Like this review.

Redback by Howard Jacobson, 1987

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Book review

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.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

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 Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, 2010

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