Wry and politely burlesque

FICTION: The Finkler QuestionBy Howard Jacobson, Bloomsbury, 307pp. £18.99

JULIAN TRESLOVE is 49 and only too aware of his multiple failures, particularly as regards women. He tends to wake to “a sense of loss” and is a romantic, attracted to frail wraiths, the sort of female stamped by the look of early death, most likely from consumption; operatic heroines who don’t sing but certainly look the part. He needs to lament love, but first he must find it. Romance has left him with two sons and many queasy memories of relationships he would prefer to forget.

An erstwhile lowly BBC radio producer, Treslove – not for nothing does the first part of his surname mean “very” in French – now harbours a festering hatred of the organisation. This “very love” antihero has had minor occupations. On the way home from a nostalgic supper with two friends, one a former teacher, the other a school pal who has soared in life, in contrast to his disasters, Treslove is mugged, humiliatingly by a woman, and on reflection believes his attacker also called him a Jew, which is he not.

The Finkler Questionmight seem to be yet another midlife-crisis yarn about what happens when you reach the point when you not only have trouble tying your shoelaces but also begin to doubt that you ever could tie them, but it is far more. Drawing on two great sources of humour, his native Manchester and his Jewishness, Howard Jacobson has long been capable of writing exuberantly fluent, intelligently comic novels, and this, his 11th, longlisted for the Man Booker, is very funny and also touching in a punchy, robust way. Treslove, "a modular, bits-and-pieces man at university, not studying anything recognisable as a subject but fitting components of different arts-related disciplines, not to say indisciplines", is likeable and allows Jacobson to poke fun at many things, not least the modern university and, of course, modern man. Here is a character whose entire life has been a matter of confused choices: "It was never entirely clear when and whether he had finished his studies, on account of no one at the university being certain how many modules made a totality – Treslove found himself with a degree so unspecific that all he could do with it was accept a graduate traineeship at the BBC."

Eventually he ends up working for a theatrical agency specialising in providing doubles of famous people for parties, conferences and corporate events. Jacobson can play a joke well and sustain it without pushing it: “Treslove didn’t look like anybody in particular, but looked like many famous people in general, and so was in demand if not by virtue of verisimilitude, at least by virtue of versatility.”

Whereas he has no one to mourn, his two friends are widowers. Libor Seveik, the old teacher who once guided both Treslove and his clever, obnoxious schoolmate Sam Finkler, philosopher and now media guru of sorts, have both lost their wives. For Libor his wife was his absolute love for more than 50 years. Finkler’s story is slightly different. His wife, Tyler, dead at 49, viewed her time with Finkler as an ironic experience. “Tyler’s life was over much more quickly. A brisk woman in all her dealings, including her adulteries, she dealt in a businesslike manner with death. She arranged what needed arranging, left instructions, demanded certain promises of Finkler, took as unemotional a farewell of her children as she could bear to take, shook hands with Finkler as over a deal that had not worked out wonderfully, but had not worked out to badly either, all things considered, and died.”

Finkler is a familiar creation; the sharp, snappy egotistical opportunist devoted to his image. He treats Treslove with barely concealed contempt, aware that his failures merely enhance his own success. Not surprisingly, when Tyler decided to extract her revenge on Finkler it was by having an affair with Treslove, who of course fell in love with her. Yet somehow Treslove never quite gives up, and eventually he meets a large, nicely plump Jewish woman, a relative of Libor, with whom he seems to settle.

All of the characters leap off the page. They are uniformly human, flawed, despairing and hopeful. As ever, Jacobson makes inspired use of what is, for him, a towering theme: that of being Jewish and not being Jewish, the enigma of a religion that is a culture. Tyler had converted in order to marry Finkler; Treslove becomes obsessed with Jewish ritual. There is a sharply political subplot seething beneath all the comedy.

Added to the politics is the tragedy. Libor, the Czech Jew who married above him, spent his career interviewing Hollywood stars. His life’s work, however, came at the very end: the mourning of his wife. When a former lover contacts him asking for help, he knows he can do nothing. Love and the loss of it drive him to desperation; to Jacobson’s credit, this is done with such delicacy. “No matter where they had got to the night before, no matter what quiet almost bearable illusion of living with her dying he believed her to have attained, the morning always dashed it.” Treslove discovers what he thinks is love, just as Finkler finally identifies the same passion, only he had not known it for what it was while he had it. It is all well handled; the timing is exact, the prose elegant in its understatement. Best of all are the exchanges between Treslove and the insufferable Finkler, whose acidic replies set up many passages of quick-fire comic dialogue.

As Treslove’s new love prepares a meal using every dish and fork in her “devastated kitchen”, the two friends admire her in different ways. As students they had “quoted Hamlet endlessly to each other . . . It was the only work of literature they had both liked at the same time. Finkler was not a literary man. Literature was insufficiently susceptible to rationality for his taste. And lacked practical application. But Hamlet worked for him. Not knowing that Finkler wanted to kill his father, Treslove hadn’t understood why”.

Their friendship has always depended on the sense of exclusion that Finkler imposes on Treslove. Exclusion is vital to the narrative, which is deceptively well orchestrated by a novelist attentive to structure and detail.

Fast moving, wry and politely burlesque, The Finkler Questionposes many questions. It is quite a performance, at times reading as a poor man's Saul Bellow, and such a comparison is more praise than criticism. There are many one-liners and laughs out loud, yet an awareness of threat is ever present. To be Jewish is not easy. To attempt to become Jewish, to infiltrate a culture shaped by lamentation, is even more difficult.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times