Pardon the intrusion
WHEN HOWARD JACOBSON slips into Zoo Time, the story is that much richer
Do you like some meta with your fiction? Plenty of perfectly discerning readers will answer that polite query with a firm negative. They’ll shout “Authorial intrusion!” with the same zest that Holden Caulfield’s fellow students shouted “Digression!” when one of their number strayed offtopic in a class presentation. In Zoo Time, the followup to his Man Bookerwinning The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson might just have effected a clever end-run around the whole issue by having his narrator/hero be an actual author — Guy Ableman, an English novelist quite a bit, in surface biography terms at least, like Howard Jacobson. You can’t claim intrusion when the author or someone set up to resemble him is there all along, can you? Well, can you?
One way Jacobson and Ableman diverge is in their respective career arcs. The real-life former, after long years of dues-paying, finally hit award-assisted pay dirt with his 10th book of fiction, while his fictional counterpart got lucky with his first and has been facing grimly diminishing returns ever since. It’s a crucial distinction, because for Ableman, his professional decline is inextricable from what he sees as a simultaneous decline in the culture of books and all they have represented. “Novels are history, not because no one can write them but because no one can read them,” he says, and he’s just getting warmed up.
The other abiding salient fact about Ableman is that, although reasonably happily married, he harbours a fervent, decades-long desire to bed his mother-in-law. Shocking? Ableman certainly hopes so, as he’s banking that just such a plot device in his novel-in-progress will score a succèsde-scandale in the jaded and shrinking marketplace. What we have here, then, is both a satire on the current (allegedly) parlous state of liter-
IAN
MCGILLIS
BOOKS ature and literary publishing and an instalment in the tradition of — sorry, but the tag can’t be stepped around — the Jewish comic mid-life novel. It has to be said that the two don’t always make comfortable bedfellows. Shifts in focus and tone sometimes jar in unintended ways. On the other hand, Jacobson can make the contrast work: after pages spent softening you up with zingers trashing everything from Kindle to Scandinavian crime writers to historical fiction (even fellow Booker alumnus Hilary Mantel gets an oblique swipe), he can turn around and land an emotional sucker punch with something like this: “When you see a person you love happy for the first time, you must ask yourself what part you’ve played i n all the misery that went before.” Perhaps unavoidably in a novel dealing with a sex-preoccupied Jewish man of a certain age, a Philip Roth-shaped shadow hovers in one’s peripheral vision. But it’s precisely in the emotional depth indicated by that quote that Jacobson earns the comparison.
Ultimately, how you feel about Zoo Time comes down to your willingness to let Jacobson play you both ways. It’s never quite clear what we, the readers, are meant be more concerned about: the impending death of the written word, or the fulfilment of the protagonist’s erotic daydreams. If you’re troubled by (or impatient with) having to make such a decision, the new Jacobson may not be for you; I would steer you instead to his The Mighty Walzer, the greatest table-tennis coming-of-age novel ever written. But if you’re happy with a novel that tramples gleefully over all notions of decorum while nurturing a secret heart of compassion, a novel whose authorial intrusions are easily forgiven by virtue of being so darn funny, a book to whom the very concept of boredom is a far-distant cousin … well, welcome to the zoo. Bravo to the Scotiabank Giller Prize jury for reminding us that literature is a meritocracy. You don’t need a special certificate to practise it. (Equally, no amount of pedigree can guarantee that a given book will be any good. See the new Tom Wolfe, if you’re brave.) Will Ferguson’s route to his Gillerwinning 419 was like that of probably no previous winner: Bestselling books filed in stores under Humour are a far cry from the standard path of literary magazine publication followed by debut collection followed by a few novels of gradually ascending acclaim/popularity. The Giller, consciously or not, could have dismissed Ferguson for that very reason, but to its great credit it didn’t. I haven’t read 419, but Roddy Doyle’s opinion carries weight in my household, so it’s only a matter of time. Do enough reading and you can be sure that life — you know, that thing that stubbornly goes on outside the pages — will hit you with poignant parallels and sometimes cruel ironies. In recent weeks, I’d been making my way contentedly through Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate, thinking wistfully that it has been too long since I walked around Manhattan myself, when the advent of hurricane Sandy transformed the book, with shocking suddenness, from a marvellously absorbing and multi-layered work that lets us see a familiar city with new eyes into a wrenching and invaluable record of a scene now fundamentally changed no matter how diligent the reconstruction will be. It would have been better if that transformation had never happened, obviously, but art, in the form of a book like Lopate’s, can be a salve for some of the wounds.