Funny peculiar

HOWARD JACOBSON is with his wife Jenny when I enter the hotel lounge at precisely 4pm (the time is important, as we will discover later). He kisses her goodbye, waiting for her to look back and wave. Returning to his seat, he commands the photographer: "Make me look Satanic." Then he turns to me and says: "And I suppose you're wondering if I'm wondering if she's off to meet her lover."

Well, I wasn't as it happens, but since he's raised the subject, let's run with this. The key sentence in Jacobson's new novel The Act Of Love is: "No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else." The book's hero, Felix Quinn, imagines such a thing. More than that, he engineers it, choosing Marius for Marisa, setting them up so he can savour the "sheer unholy sweetness" of being a cuckold.

The story is unnerving and sad but also sexy and frequently hilarious. At one point, well into this strange arrangement, Jacobson has Felix say: "Whenever I caught sight of him (Marius] his hair was wet… the look suited him. Men like me emerge from water blind and dripping like a rat that has gnawed itself out of a sack; Marius belonged to that class of amphibian mammal that rises glistening from the sea, shaking silver droplets from its torso, like Neptune."

With writing this classy, Jacobson could sell concepts that are even more mind-boggling. And with a face so long it seems to end halfway to Hell, the Satanic expression comes easy. So, back to the question I never asked: has he, would he…? "Goodness me, no. I'd die if I discovered my wife was having an affair, I couldn't bear it. But writers have their preoccupations and I come clean: I'm fascinated by losers, and by masochism."

Jacobson, 66, a market trader's son from Manchester, announced himself 25 years ago with the campus comedy Coming From Behind, often dubbed the Jewish Lucky Jim. Among nine previous novels, he's immortalised ping pong as the game of the gods in The Mighty Walzer. His last, Kalooki Nights, which grappled with the Holocaust and joked about the unjokeable, was rated by some as his masterpiece and, for a while, its author believed this.

"A writer can only be disappointed," he sighs. "You never get what you really want, which is: 'This is the greatest novel ever written.' I almost got it with that book and told myself: 'Well, I'm happy now.' But half an hour later you read a bad review in some… insignificant magazine."

Jacobson says the best insurance policy against criticism, or worse, was proposed by Kingsley Amis. "He advised aspiring authors: 'When your manuscript comes back rejected, the top page will be dog-eared. Re-type it so the next publisher thinks he's getting the first read.' And he told authors who got published to work on the assumption that nothing would happen and to get on with the next book right away."

Jacobson compares books with lovers and starting a new one as "an act of infidelity". He began "cheating" on Kalooki Nights in Marylebone, London, near where he lives. It was an early winter's afternoon and he remembers the time – 4pm. Waiters were enjoying a smoke and it was the "oscillation" between day and evening and ahead was erotic possibility. "I started to think about all things pivotal in romance: between confidence and fear, between love and not love. So before I knew this was going to be a book about jealousy, I had the atmosphere."

You need more than atmosphere, however, if you're going to write about eroticism – especially if you're English. "The English are very pragmatic and I like that," he adds, "but it's not terrifically helpful when thinking about love, because love is one of the things you need to be philosophical about. Fanny Hill was breezy, (Henry] Fielding's way was bouncy, (Tobias] Smollett's way was bouncy and foolish, and we don't do pornography. The French do philosophy and they do pornography and their great pornographers know something that the English won't acknowledge: that eroticism tends to death. Georges Bataille said that we seek what imperils us. No English writer has been able to say that. Until me, ha ha."

So how is Jacobson, who is still chuckling behind his whiskers at this boast, qualified to write that elusive thing: the great English erotic novel? He says: "I'm a man in my sixties, I've been married three times, I've had a lot of girlfriends, I've never not been with a woman – pathetic, I know – and I've probably thought about sex as much as anyone ever has. I've imagined everything. There's nothing I've not imagined. Every pleasure and every pain. We all have noble feelings but the better the writer the greater his access to the base feelings, the more strange and frightening ones." He says he peered deep into his heart for The Act Of Love.

Jacobson is on a roll, even though 4pm in Edinburgh at the surrounding tables seems to be promising nothing more tantalising than additional scones. "We live under a tyranny of normality and people are made miserable by the idea that such a thing exists," he says. Researching the book, he visited a swingers' club popular among taxi-drivers in leatherwear and an S&M club where "everyone honoured each other's strangeness".

He also thinks Max Mosley is honourable. "I found nothing shameful in what he did; in fact I think he should have apologised less. Who can say what is normal? People have a right to be peculiar."

How's he peculiar? "Well, I was a bounder when I was a young man – I was a bastard. My first and second wives would tell you that, especially the first, because when I was an academic I had a terrible reputation as a philanderer." Arriving at Sydney University in 1964, he couldn't believe that the women were so beautiful – and so sexually adventurous. "There was a lot of antagonism between the sexes and lots of Australian men were gay and in denial so we Englishmen seemed exotic. The whole department screwed. Actually in the department. Between 1 and 2pm, no one went for lunch. Girls knocked on our doors and everyone screwed on the floors."

Jacobson's excuse is that as a student himself at Cambridge he "hoped to meet young titled women – hoped that my parents would eventually get to live in Castle Howard", but in three years his only girlfriend was a launderette manageress twice his age.

Jacobson has always preferred older women. He started trying to woo them as a teenager and admits that may have been a delayed reaction to his mother holding aloft his baby brother "like he was the FA Cup" – the first time jealousy got the better of him. He denies The Act Of Love is in any way autobiographical, but this preference is one of many areas in which author and hero overlap, or maybe that should be oscillate, like day does with night. Jacobson peers deep into his heart so we don't have to. It is long gone four o'clock, the hairspring hour as he calls it. I leave him to his wait, for his wife to return. v

The Act Of Love (Jonathan Cape) is published September 18, £17.99