Book review: The Finkler Question

TIME is running out. You sense it slipping across these pages, eroding the words, becoming a cliché: the death of everything, of the novel, the end of the world, the passing of love — to be precise of the flesh of the loved one — but not of loving. Losing the loved one is not the same as losing love, but it's bad enough.

No graver matter pervades the pages of The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson's latest holler from the halls of comic genius. The man who loves deepest, it seems, is most deeply snared in sorrow.

Julian Treslove, aged 49, a failed BBC producer, whose career, having hit the small time never revived, sees in his closest, oldest friends, Samuel Finkler (philosopher, writer, TV pundit) and Libor Sevcik (revered former teacher, and sometime biographer of a hormone-slick of goddesses from the Hollywood era of glamour), in the maw of such irrepressible bereavement.

Treslove has spent his mediocrity in casual relationships--two women, a son by each — and he wonders now if this is why he feels alone: "Was he protecting himself against the companioned happiness he longed for because he dreaded how he would feel when it was taken from him?'"

Sevcik and Finkler have both recently lost their wives. The former is desolate after decades of mutual devotion, the latter is angry, despite his unfaithfulness (and hers, of which he knows not). Treslove has "tears enough for all of them" — and fantasies of love-affairs with women, both real and imagined.

When, if ever, will she come, the love of his life? His existence feels plotless, pointless, relieved by spats of intellectual sparring with the cleverer, ber-Jewish philosopher Finkler ("My name's Samuel, not Sam. Sam's a private investigator's name. Samuel was a prophet."). Libor, sagacious, oversees his bright former pupils, attempting to bend their inflexibilities, his Jewishness untrumpeted, while Samuel's, worn like a breastplate, flares against Jews who make him ashamed of the fascist treatment, as he perceives it, of Palestinians in Gaza.

Life and death, in trapped juxtaposition, like partners in a marriage, mutually needy, wait at the novel's every turn.

And out of this need, this co-habitation, Howard Jacobson salvages desperate comedy, howls of wanton, ambiguous irony: "Was the loss that Treslove dreaded precisely the happiness he craved?" As a boy he visited a fortune-teller and learned that a woman called Juno would be the one. "I also see danger," the gypsy had told him.

Thus, the story gains a plot of sorts (whither Juno?), suspense and surprise, (is it physical danger, or merely a threat to Julian's soul?). You don't have to wait long for gratification. Five pages in, Treslove is mugged, bludgeoned, mocked, or cursed, or threatened, he isn't sure which, by a female assailant.

Mortification precedes his puzzlement. Had she really called him "You Jew"? - and he a Gentile who'd never thought of himself as Jewish.

This triggers a long (sometimes self-indulgent) examination by the characters of the nature and obligations of being Jewish. It is the familiar comic burden of being Jacobson's Chosen People that his Jews, and here the not-so-innocent bystander, Julian Treslove, should undergo angst-ridden self-laceration. There may indeed be balm in Gilead, but none here. At least until Hephzibah, Libor's grand-niece, pops up. Treslove is smitten. "No day went by without her being an event."

But will it last? And where is Juno? And what of Samuel and Libor, their faltering resurrections, "hot" dates and sorrows? Samuel resorts to TV poker, a late-night retreat, "because it's the nearest thing to being dead" without actually dying. Yet, you feel from the novel's outset, that someone must die, a consummation of its themes of devotion and love and ubiquitous loss.

Jacobson sends his characters up whilst keeping them earthed, not despite, but because of their comical foibles.

The opening chapters of this novel boast some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language, as though the writer, like his characters, is caught up in a whirlwind courtship (of each other, of the reader, of the idea of the preciousness of now in the teeth of time's passing). Jacobson's brilliance thrives on the risk of riding death to a photo-finish, of writing for broke. Exhilaration all the way.

THE FINKLER QUESTION

by Howard Jacobson

Bloomsbury, 307pp, 18.99

Howard Jacobson is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 14 August.b