Harry's Place Arts

Howard Jacobson can write prose in a rhythm that can really move you along.  I’ve just picked up Roots Schmoots and come across this paragraph:-

I don’t recall any family rambling or cycling, but we could  have rambled or cycle, so many resemblances did we bear to the cheerful, thoughtful, self-improving gentile lower-lower middle classes of 1950s Manchester.  And yet, had any authentic gentile rambler peered late through our particular windows, he would have beheld scenes of such primitive industry that he must have supposed to be tinkers from some part of Turkey not mentioned in any atlas.  For, like many Jewish families of that time, ours was a market family . . – and when we were not sitting in a circle on the floor, straightening out and putting into bundles the banknotes which my father shook like confetti from his market apron, we were making up bags of discoloured chocolate to be thrown free, as crowd-pullers, from my father’s stall; or counting out plastic poppet beads from a hessian sack and popping them together to make necklaces; or stylishly arranging a sponge, a facecloth, a toothbrush and  a shoe brush in a see-though bag on which we then stapled a label saying HOLIDAY KIT, to be sold the next day to gentile cyclists who were looking for that very thing to fit inside their saddle-bags.

The observation, the detail, the feeling of family solidarity and industry conveyed, the engaging warmth – yes, Howard Jacobson is an excellent writer.  I’ll enjoy reading Roots Schmoots as I know it will be full of insight, critical intelligence and wit. I read his columns in The Independent and when he and Caryl Churchill were fighting over that nasty piece of work, Seven Jewish Children, I was on his side.

I do wish though he wouldn’t write novels.  I have read a couple of them – Kalooki Nights (all over the place) and The Act of Love (absurd) and now I have pushed myself through The Finkler Question, which won the Man Booker prize, to the delight of those who share Jacobson’s fears of rising anti-Semitism.

My first objection was to the main character, Julian Treslove.  He’s the same mournful romantic guy, doomed to be humiliated that starred  in The Act of Love and Kalooki Nights.  As Maxie in Kalooki Nights got together with women with a diaeresis in their names – Zoe and Chloe – so does Julian fall for women whose names begin with “J” so there’s a June, a Josephine, a Janice culminating with a Juno.  This, you understand, puns with Ju/Jew – the only purpose being to annoy me like fuck with its pointless pattern making.  Julian’s romanticism includes fantasies of having women literally die in his arms and so he names his sons Rodolfo and Alfredo from La Boheme and La Traviata.  The problem with doing that is that when one of them gets involved in some serious novelistic action, it’s incongruous, as if one of Donald Duck’s nephews, Hughie, Dewey and Louis, was  required to be Elizabeth Bennet’s suitor in Pride and Prejudice.

After about a hundred pages of Julian and his friendship with the popular philosopher Finkler and the  tragic bereaved Czech Libor which I wasn‘t faintly interested in,  Finkler goes on Desert Island Discs and says vis-a-vis Israel/Palestine matters, that he is ashamed to be a Jew, and at that point the novel starts to get going.  Finkler sets up an ASHamed Jews movement, and there is scope for a story with satirical bite, that of a progressive who is brought down by the forces that he unwisely consorts with.  That is the story of Kingsley Amis‘s Girl, 20 (which I thoroughly recommend) when the trendy 50 something violinist tries to get  down with the yoof, and the yoof basically do him over.  But this does not last long enough though there are a few pages featuring the anti-Jewish Jew who is trying to make his foreskin re-grow, and recording the process on a blog, which are a good dig against both obsessively anti-Jewish Jews and blog performances generally, showy off buggers that we are.

The Finkler Question is a roman a clef e.g.  when one character says of a film director “He has said he understands why some people might want to blind my grandson” (in an anti-Semitic attack) she is referring to Ken Loach and the play that is a great hit among the progressives, The Sons of Abraham, is of course Seven Jewish Children.  I daresay some of the activists in Finkler’s ASHamed movement are identifiable as real people as well.

The novel deals with various themes:- resurgent anti-Semitism against the diaspora arising from the obsession of the Western left with Israel; the difference between Jewish and gentile culture; the nature of philo-Semitism.  These are presented as the thoughts of a character (e.g. one searches the internet and sees a frightening list of anti-Semitic incidents) or in unlikely dialogue.    They are interesting and important ideas and Howard Jacobson could write any amount of articles on them.   I’d love to read a non-fiction book on his on philo-Semitism for instance. But they didn’t work in the novel as they are not incorporated into its fabric but are pinned on it like badges.

What could have shaped the novel, of how Finkler goes from being an anti-Israel secularist to saying Khaddish over and over for the dead Libor, doesn‘t take up enough space, which is filled with the limp character Julian and his dull inability to get on with women and his life.  Like Kalooki Nights, the novel is all over the place.

Jacobson says of stories:-

Just as it is impossible to write a novel that is without melancholy, so is it impossible to write a novel without a story.

A story, mind, not a plot: it is a mistake to confuse the one with another. For it is a story for a person of a particular appearance to walk into a particular room wearing a particular expression. No more need ever happen, for my money, always provided that something or other is made vivid – maybe the person, maybe the room, maybe the expression, or maybe nothing other than the way the author feels or doesn’t feel – absence of feeling being as good a story as any – about one or all of them.

. . .

Though Dickens plotted like a dervish, I would swap every coincidence and denouement he contrived for a single passage of description of the torpor of a Victorian Sunday in London, or the rains coming out again in Lincolnshire.

Well, you could say he’s making a virtue out of necessity as Jacobson could describe the rains beautifully, but not in a novel that makes me want to read to the end.  His novels have no momentum, whether of character or incident.

Novels were frivolous once.  You didn’t read them before lunch or on a Sunday and they weren’t regarded as literature.  Writers who wanted to be treated as serious wrote verse tragedies, which were mostly dreadful.   Now a writer who wants to be treated as serious writes a novel, when he or she could be writing biography, criticism or travel.  Howard Jacobson has done criticism and travel with sensitivity and observation, and could do biography.  He’s a highly intelligent guy and a good writer.  If only he didn’t write novels.