The genius of Jacobson's Booker-winning The Finkler Question is that it refuses to be defined as either comedy or tragedy. But, as he says himself, laughter only works when it's deadly serious.
HOWARD JACOBSON wasn't expecting snow in November, but as we sit in a Dublin hotel lobby, it's almost inevitable that Joyce's The Deadcomes up. Without missing a beat, the Mancunian writer mentions literature's most famous Jew, Leopold Bloom. "Isn't it fascinating that it took a non-Jew to capture so well what it is to be Jewish?" he says.
Jewishness is a subject that permeates his novels, from Sefton Goldberg in Coming From Behindto 2006's Kalooki Nights,described by Jacobson as "the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere".
His latest, The Finkler Question, also tackles the subject but through the eyes of Julian Treslove, a pathetic, morbidly romantic gentile who becomes increasingly obsessed with Jewishness. Not in a spiritual sense, but in its totemic trappings, rituals and sense of family.
“Finkler” is not merely the surname of the novel’s “ashamed Jew” Sam; it becomes a sobriquet for Jewishness. “People tell me all the time that my work is about Jewish identity, but I’ve never really felt that. Jewish history, Jewish ways, the Jewish joke . . . they all interest me and Treslove being in love with all those things was a way of spoofing that.”
Treslove is friends with two Jewish men, Sam Finkler and a much older man called Libor. The trio share woes and rivalries, buoyed along by Jacobson’s trademark black comedy. One-liners ripple across every page, but he has described it as “the saddest book I’ve ever written”.
“I didn’t know it would be so sad, but I knew it would be a book about loss. Part of it comes from my own sense of getting old and frightened, of friends dying. There was also that sense of staleness, of attrition, of being worn down and I really liked writing about that.
“The book tumbled into various levels of sadness and despair, and it felt right and true. We’re often wrong about what it’s like to be old, that a man at the end of his life couldn’t feel the same intensity as a young man.
“It’s in Libor’s character, but it came out of my own sense of getting old but not feeling older. It’s exciting to think you’ll still be intact when you age, but it’s also frightening because it means you’ll go down screaming.”
When Jacobson began writing The Finkler Question, the characters of Finkler, Treslove and Libor were all the same age and had been through much more in their lives. At 10,000 words, he had a feeling something wasn't quite right. "It was going in the direction of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys— you know, two old men still fighting with each other until the end — and I wasn't very happy about that. So I did something I've never done in my life with a novel . . . I gave it to my wife. Normally no one sees what I'm working on until it's finished.
“She said to me: ‘You wouldn’t be giving me this unless you think there’s something wrong. Do you want me to see if there is?’ I told her yes, and immediately she pointed out that all three characters being old offered no hope. I fought against it, but she was completely right.”
Jacobson met his wife more than 20 years ago and they have been married for nine years. "I read her all of my columns [he writes for the London Independent] and she's read the six novels I've written in that time. We met when she directed a film of mine and she's someone whose ear I trust, so I believed her about this book."
The friendship between the three men is intriguing. Finkler and Libor are widowed and Treslove once had a lukewarm affair with Finkler’s wife. The two younger men are engaged in a competitive battle that Jacobson sees as central to all male friendships.“My wife is fantastically loyal to her friends. She remembers their birthdays, worries about them. I’m not like that (laughs). Although there are men I love, it’ll often take their deaths or illness to make me realise how important they are to me.
“However much we care for each other, men are full of rivalry — sexually, with work . . . it’s primitive, and often hard for novelists to be generous to one another. It’s been very instructive seeing who wrote to me about the prize and what they said.”
The prize is the Man Booker Prize, which Jacobson finally won this year. In the past, he has been famously critical of it, but claims he can’t remember calling it “an abomination”.
"Some of the judging has been poor and I wondered 'where are the writers who make you laugh?' It was either being won by quiet, little novels or post- Tristram Shandyjocose books. But then my birth as a novelist has been intertwined with the Booker. It became so big in the late 1970s and 1980s when Salman Rushdie and William Golding were winning."
Jacobson was longlisted for the prize in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now?and in 2006 for Kalooki Nights.
"A lot of people said that I'd win for Kalooki Nightsand when I didn't, I remember thinking that I'd never write a book that would win it, which was okay, because I was nearing the age when it won't mean anything." I interrupt. Really? Winning the Booker wouldn't mean anything? "Well you see I remembered the writer Richard Adams saying years ago that winning a prize late in life wouldn't mean as much to him. He was very melancholic about it and I hoped I wouldn't feel like that." Jacobson's response to his Booker win has been been antithetical, in that he has loftily claimed it "saved" him. "Being on the shortlist, I thought 'they get me' and a lot of people were telling me they liked the book and that it could win. About a week before I thought, 'there's no way', that the Jewish thing would scupper it. But the reviews were good, it was selling well, getting attention in America and I just made my peace with the idea of not winning.
“I went to the awards in a state of calm. Andrew Motion got up to announce the winner and began listing adjectives about the winning book, including ‘plangent’ which I’ll remember until the day I die. When he mentioned ‘comedy and pathos’, I thought ‘It’s me’, and I had this strange emptying out, a cold calm almost, before being smothered in hugs by men. I felt elevated and I’ve been in that state ever since.”
The Finkler Questionmay not be Jacobson's best book, but it is undoubtedly funny. As well as the Booker win, he's been a past recipient of the PG Wodehouse prize for comic writing, a tag he takes exception to. "Comic is such a tricky word. It's become a synonym for lightness or ribaldry.
“I hate that, because I’ve never felt I’m a ‘light’ writer. I’ve been in a battle with comedy all my life. Laughter only works when something deadly serious happens. It’s Dickens when he’s furious, it’s Saul Bellow and Philip Roth when they’re on the edge. The challenge in comedy is to make people laugh at death, not at exuberance. Take comedy into hell and then laugh.”
The mention of Roth brings to mind Jacobson being dubbed “the English Philip Roth” (he responded by declaring himself “the Jewish Jane Austen”) and Roth’s productivity has increased with age. Does Jacobson feel that same frantic urge to get it all down, to write more? “I find that writing comes easy now and I’m loving it, which is a change.
“It’s not too much to say that I go to pieces if I don’t have a book on the go. At the moment I’m doing so much talking about this book, that I’m not getting to write much. I don’t mind though, because it helps to cast a light on my other work and vindicates it, in a way. I always wanted to write, but I never thought I’d love writing as much as I do.”
Before we part, Jacobson reveals that he is actually working on something new. “It’s an entirely comic novel, there are no Jews in it and it’s about literary failure.” He laughs before adding “Now how do I go back to that?”
The Finkler Questionis published by Bloomsbury
