Warning: don’t read it in the quiet coach

Side-splittingly funny and serious, too, Howard Jacobson has written one of the all-time great memoirs

MOTHER’S BOY by Howard Jacobson 280pp, Jonathan Cape, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

I should declare an interest: I once had the cheek to ask Howard Jacobson for a quote to go on the front cover of one of my books. He obliged. But if you think that means I am in his pocket, think again. I have been a fan ever since I read his first novel, Coming from Behind, in 1984. I knew there was something special about it because I had seen my director of studies in Eng lit at Cambridge chuckling over the paperback. The only contemporary fiction he allowed anywhere near his students was by Samuel Beckett, which hardly counts. I was dumbfounded: I think I’d have been less so if I’d caught him in bed with a woman.

And now, 16 novels, one Booker Prize and five and a half non-fiction books later (one, Jacobson’s first of any of them, was co-written), we have his autobiography, and given what we know now about his writing, we have every reason to suspect it will be extremely good, full not only of jokes but of serious moments where seriousness is proper. I am happy to report that it is better than that.

The jokes are so good that even when reading an electronic version on a cracked phone in a crowded train that seemed to be going nowhere slowly, I was laughing so much that if I’d been in the quiet coach I’d have been thrown out. As for the seriousness, it is there in abundance; it has to be for the jokes to be as good as they are.

Here’s one of his lighter jokes, delivered insouciantly, almost in passing. (The context: his mother has opened a shop selling miscellaneous knick-knacks in a grim part of Manchester.) “Though I liked visiting the shop when I was in Manchester to stock up on short-life light bulbs and teaspoons that bent in boiling water, I found the precinct hard on the eye and on the nerves.” The seriousness comes in its greatest force with the death of his mother, and the discovery of her diaries. I will not spoil the surprise, and the deep serenity of the ending, except to say it will, after all you’ve been through, leave you in tears, if you have tears to shed.

This autobiography, which is as good as any, and I mean any, I have ever read, takes us from his birth in 1942 to the publication of his first novel. (Those who know his work will recognise many scenes from his novels. Those who do not know his work will still enjoy it. And there is much here that is stranger and funnier than fiction, such as the time he yelled at his brother’s band while studying for his A-levels: the band went on to become 10cc.)

It took him a long time to get there, though he had known from childhood that he wanted to be a writer, understanding the high purposes of literature almost intuitively, and having just the right temperament to be one: an outsider, someone who said nay rather than yea to most things ordinary people say yea to; as well as, of course, a way with words. But he was 40 when he published his first novel, which is ancient by most reckonings, or was then. In his mid30s, he is still brooding, harder then ever, on the ages the best novelists were when they were first published: “Charles Dickens and Tolstoy, 24. Dostoevsky, 25. EMForster, 26…” This is not the full list he gives us.

Jacobson ascribes this to a number of reasons, but the main one (after the matter of his Jewishness, which he examines at some length) is the influence of his teacher at Cambridge, FR Leavis, who, like mine, considered contemporary fiction to be beyond the pale. Literature was the most serious business of all: considered properly, it was as important as religion, possibly more so. Few if any of his pupils went on to write a novel, as what were the odds they were going to produce something as good as anything they studied? Not that there weren’t already dozens, if not hundreds, of imposters in the canon. This is a powerful attitude to pass on to the young.

As for the other things that held Jacobson back, they boil down to the heady and surprisingly complex mixture of self-doubt and timewasting, as well as the suspicion that not writing was doing the world a favour. That his father – variously a market trader, cab driver and children’s magician – had never read a book can’t have helped much, either.

But in the 1980s, towards what he, with good reason, thought was the end of his second marriage, he set up a card table and sat down with a typewriter. His wife, Rosalin (to whom he stayed married until 2004), asked him what his subject was, and he replied “failure”, to which she said “a hoot” and “it should fly off the shelves”.

We are already wary of this wife, who once tried to have him thrown out of a lecture he was actually giving (their first meeting) and whose favourite plays, such as The Bacchae, are those in which “a woman kills at least one man”. This is a typical Jacobson joke: all the funnier because it reveals deep purpose. But all in its place: when he writes about the end of his marriages, we are not in (his coinage) jokesville. Comedy is serious business.

His father – a market trader, cab driver and children’s magician – had never read a book