Pussy: A Novel by Howard Jacobson
Pussy: A Novel by Howard Jacobson Jonathan Cape £12.99
To the Grand Duke and Duchess of Origen is born a son, a dot-eyed, thinskinned, petulant princeling whose hair is the colour of lemon custard. They name him Fracassus and place him before multiple television screens in the Palace of the Golden Gates, which lies in the Walled Republic of Urbs-ludus. Like all babies, Fracassus believes the world is his ‘to eat, to tear, to kick’. But, unlike other babies, he also believes that the world is Fracassus. The Grand Duke marvels at his son’s qualities: ‘He lacks charm, he lacks looks, he lacks humour, he lacks quickness, he lacks companionableness, and yet he’s arrogant!’ Nothing if not discriminating, Fracassus likes what is combative and divisive and dislikes what is constructive and discursive. He doesn’t like women to wear trousers and he likes to grab their pussies. He doesn’t like conversation (other people are boring) and he likes Twitter, because he can use small words and assert his will.
Despite the best efforts of his tutors, Professor Probius and Dr Cobalt, Fracassus grows up to believe that politics is a form of light entertainment, that Caffè Nero is owned by the hero of his favourite television show, Emperor Nero, and that Ancient Rome – a place he would like to visit – is in Los Angeles.
A satire in the Swiftian vein, this is Howard Jacobson’s fifteenth novel and first hand grenade. If Donald Trump’s policy is to move fast and break things, then he has a competitor in Jacobson, who began Pussy in the aftermath of Trump’s election victory and completed it well before Trump’s catastrophic failure to repeal Obamacare. Pussy is what the publishing world calls an ‘instant book’ and it has all the qualities of a fleet response: undigested rage, whip-smart wit, devastating fluency and an aim as straight as an arrow. We have long known that Trump was good fodder for comedy, but Pussy is more than a series of jokes at the expense of an incendiary narcissist with the hands of a child. Jacobson attacks the culture that produced Trump, in which the apotheosis of success is not paying tax and the language of Shakespeare is reduced to a patois of self-promoting sound bites. ‘I fail to see,’ worries the Grand Duchess when her son is introduced to Twitter, ‘how Fracassus is ever going to attain 140 characters.’
Less pantomime villain than innocent abroad, Fracassus is conceived as a modern-day Candide. Professor Pangloss, the mentor of Voltaire’s young hero, becomes Professor Probius, who explains to his charge that: ‘There is no such thing as the will of the people. There is only the will of those who tell the people what the people’s will should be.’ A bare-chested, toe-wrestling Putin is captured in the character of Vozzec Spravchik, Minister of Home Affairs of the Republic of Cholm and presenter of the nation’s favourite TV show, in which contestants are paid to stab their friends and family in the back. From Spravchik, Fracassus learns that it is better to have cancer than a lesbian for a daughter. (Tweet: ‘Vozzec Spravchik’s daughter announces she is a lesbian. So sad.’)
Watched by his tutors, Fracassus soon gets his own TV show, Stop It!, and defeats a trousered female rival in the race to be Prime Mover. ‘I did long ago predict,’ says Probius, ‘that those who tell the stories run the world.’
‘Stories! what stories?’ replies Dr Cobalt. ‘He doesn’t have anything to tell.’ ‘That,’ replies Probius, ‘is the story.’ And this is the story, savagely well told by our greatest comic novelist, of how we got to the state we’re in. To order from Wordery for £11.79 incl p&p, go to http://www.theoldie.co.uk/books