Cuckold comfort

So, I've finally read a novel by Howard Jacobson, the English Philip Roth, the dog's beytsim of Jewish fiction this side of New York. For some time now, his every new book has been announced by Jonathan Cape with hushed and vaguely messianic awe, along with a zealous conviction that this would be the year that he would be garlanded with critical approval and guaranteed a seat at every awards dinner.

He has, of course, been passed over by the Booker judges again this year, but I'm wary of the judgement of a panel headed by a man whose most recent media foray was a documentary which explored in hideous detail what might be the most painless way to execute someone without ever pausing to wonder if the utter barbarism of it all might just indicate it to be a futile search.

I was impressed and deeply so, but one is clearly meant to be. It is books such as this that make me wary of reviewing for the heavyweight supplements of Sunday's press.

Its conceit is that every man secretly desires that his wife take a lover and the machinations of its plot are those of Felix Quinn meddling surreptitiously in the affairs of his wife in order that she end up in the arms of the predatory voluptuary Marius.

I'm not really sure I'm able to identify to any useful extent with Felix's desire to be the cuckolded husband. I can't say I've much experience of situations analogous, but I think I know enough to say that my sexual predilections do not encompass the joy of jealousy at the thought of my partner with another. So my reaction to the scenario is necessarily dispassionate: I don't know the rules of the game.

Indeed, I think that's my feeling about the book as a whole. It drips with erudition and literary context, bandying about references to Dostoevsky and Dickens in such a knowing fashion, a fashion my paltry knowledge of the classics fails to illuminate, that I dimly suspect the whole affair might be some sort of pastiche, some sort of phantasmagorical test by Jacobson, to see who is worthy of his engagement. If so, I rather think I've failed. I admire the book and its author but no more than that.

Felix's grandfather is said to have been in Zurich at the same time as an Irish writer, who entreats him to sleep with his wife, for the mutual gratification of all concerned, an offer he seemingly accepts out of politeness before fleeing the city.

Whether that meant Joyce had to try again with someone else, or simply had to make it up, is one of those literary mysteries that no amount of reading and rereading Ulysses will solve.

Now that's wit. It's totally beyond me even to conceive of emulating him in this department, unfortunately, but better green eyes than green ink, I suppose.

It was actually quite a shock to find myself so stumped for a response after having engaged so completely with the previous book I'd read, Inside the Whale by Jennie Rooney. It's one of those debut novels which makes one impatiently excited at the prospect of having found a future star. It's narrated in alternate chapters by Stevie and Michael, whose night together before Michael is shipped out to fight in Africa results in a baby.

Traumatised by the horrors of war in general and by his accidental killing of a friend specifically, Michael stays away so long that Stevie gives him up for dead and finds another man to father her child. When he does return, they meet briefly, not knowing that each has warily observed the other in advance, but their lives have grown apart.

Michael's story is narrated from a hospice bed and in his last days he tells a nurse his story. She realises only belatedly that the woman he has mooned over is her mother. It's note perfect, full of fresh and uncontrived language and delicately shaded with historical context. Direct social commentary is not really attempted, but I feel that would have weighed the book down. It is self-contained in reflection of the isolation of its narrators, who know that the tragedy of their regret must be borne alone, not bequeathed.

Nicely enough, Jennie came into the shop to sign copies just a day or two after I read it, but I rather suspect the sight of my suddenly rising up from behind a stock trolley, whose lower reaches I happened to be sorting through when she arrived, and bounding over to her with puppy-dog enthusiasm to laud her for uncanny literary sensibilities was a little too startling to make the encounter one she'd wish to repeat.

I have a new role at the shop which takes me off the shopfloor several days a week. Unfortunately, I have been wedged into a corner of the accounts department, which means that I am subjected to a constant diet of Shite FM, or Virgin Radio as it proclaims itself to be with forceful frequency, a station so middle of the road I suspect it may be run by lollipop ladies. The Police, Queen, Oasis... oh Christ, so much Oasis. And you'd think 'Ashes to ashes' and 'Let's dance' were all Bowie had ever recorded.

And does anyone need to hear the the latest Coldplay single - I don't know what it's called and I'm determined to remain ignorant - twice an hour? This morning, when the chords of doom rang out, I went off to do a bit of shopfloor research to avoid listening to it for a third time: I came back fifteen minutes later and they were playing it again! If I wanted to hear Chris Martin bleating on incessantly, I'd be Gwyneth Paltrow and, frankly, there's very little evidence supporting that possibility.

Zuckerman's dying swansong

(Originally posted on 15th September 2007)

Given my almost lycanthropic relationship with sunshine, last week's release from summer's clammy embrace has been quite blissful. Thursday morning saw me quite joyous as I beheld the mist hanging over the railway cutting and I struck out with crisp strides to the tube station.

Befitting such an autumnal turn, I decided to read Exit Ghost, Philip Roth's forthcoming final chronicle of Nathan Zuckerman. I'd given a quote to The Bookseller, admittedly somewhat mischievously, that it was "the Deathly Hallows of serious literature" and anticipated a masterpiece comparable to Updike or Bellow.

I read it with burgeoning disbelief. It's the worst book I've read all year.

The pivotal relationship of the book is that between Zuckerman and Jamie, the wife of the couple with whom Zuckerman has arranged to swap houses. He remembers her from some lecture he gave when she was a student, although her recollections of the encounter are not noted. He too had the privilege of meeting a literary idol when young, the now forgotten E I Lonoff, whose biography Jamie's sometime lover - and is he still? - is intent on writing.

Zuckerman's attitude to the biographer Kliman is aloof, condescending and obnoxious to the point that his valid concerns about the motives for reintroducing Lonoff to the canon are undermined. Kliman and Zuckerman are diametric: young and old, extroverted and introverted, full of vim and full of bile. Kliman represents how tawdry the relationship between the artist and his audience has become.

Now I'm all for a bit of misanthropy from time to time, especially if it's done with the sort of élan which demarcates its author as occupying the sort of high ground which validates it. Roth, as a great twentieth century writer, has that, but Zuckerman does not. I think Roth has here allowed Zuckerman to become a mouthpiece for his views on the sanctity of literature. I'm sure there are students of Philip Roth who might say that I've completely misjudged where Roth ends and Zuckerman begins. But both Zuckerman and Roth, who are similarly reclusive, evidently feel that the man and the writer are entities to be considered separately and, in that fundamental kinship, Roth, to my mind at least, undermines that very idea.

I'm not going any further down that route. It'll only end in tears and discussion of Wagner. Every reader reads his own book, and I'll gladly leave it at that.

The oddest thing about Exit Ghost, though, is the passages where Zuckerman, each time he has spoken with Jamie, writes these imagined conversations between the two of them in the form of a playscript. I'm not sure if these passages are also meant to indicate some of extrapolated subtext to their conversations. It's more than likely I've missed the point altogether, but to make proper sense of it all, I'd have to read it again, and I'm not sure I've done anything to deserve that.

I must confess at this point that this is only the second Roth I've ever read and the first was a much earlier work I read about fifteen years ago. I really ought to try American Pastoral or The Human Stain or indeed just about anything else he's written, going by his exalted reputation.

I do seem to have a knack for homing in on the dodgy ones when I make a foray into the backlist of big name authors I've hitherto managed to avoid. William Boyd? I read Armadillo. Absolute rubbish. Matthew Kneale? Small Crimes In An Age Of Abundance. One first-class short story and eleven wearisome ones. Margaret Atwood? Oryx and Crake. Bloody tedious and certainly amongst the odder choices by a Booker panel to make the shortlist; it's a weak dystopian short story dragged out to novel length, like one of those dreadful 80s 12-inch extended remixes.

I'm quite sure in all three cases that their reputations do not rely on the books I happened to try and that I'd be as smitten as anyone else by Any Human Heart or English Passengers or The Handmaid's Tale. They're on to the 'to read' pile, the only downside of that being that if it were just the one pile, it'd be a hazard to aircraft, so I can't guarantee a second chance to any of them before the Tories get back into power.

Or, by way of a more recognisable time scale for any Americans who've stumbled across this, before the Rapture.

Incidentally*, I was reading in Have A Nice Doomsday, Nicholas Guyatt's despatches from America's Bible Belt, that there are hundreds of thousands of Christians who are so convinced that Jesus will whisk them up to heaven at a moment's notice that they won't take jobs like piloting aircraft or driving buses because they don't want to condemn their passengers to the rather messy fate that awaits people when the person in charge of their vehicle they're in suddenly vanishes in a puff of sanctimony.

Well, that's the evangelical for you: a couple of disciples short of a Last Supper but considerate with it.

I've been listening to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy by Elton John while writing this. I'll steadfastly defend Elton John up to a point, but that point is 1976. Floreat 1972-76 and there's not been a song worth growing ears for since. But his early stuff is extraordinarily beautiful, even if the remastered versions out now still don't hide the fact that the drumming sounds like a frankfurter on an upturned bucket.

*Oh, all right, I confess: it was just a very contrived link. Still, Eddie Izzard would be proud of me.