Howard’s way to surmount life’s mortifications
Howard Jacobson looks perturbed. “What do you mean by ‘still’?” he says when I observe that, unlike some of his generation of English novelists, his prose still crackles with energy. I’m suggesting that waiting until he was in his forties to publish his first novel – as Jacobson did with Coming from Behind (1983) – has left him with deeper reserves to draw on later in his career.
“It’s possible I still have making up to do,” he says, warming to the idea. “My work has to feel alive, so it is music to my ears to hear you say there’s still energy in my prose.”
At 76, Jacobson remains a vigorous figure, living in London’s Soho, writing most days and, in the hour we spend together, passing judgment on topics including social media (“terrifying”), Brexit (“it’s become an illness for the Leavers”), cancel culture (“total bullshit”), Boris Johnson (“I hate him”) and Jeremy Corbyn (“the Jews-withmoneybags brand of antisemitism is alive and well in the Labour Party”). What Jacobson really wants to discuss, though, is his new novel, Live a Little, and specifically one of its protagonists.
“Beryl is one of those mysteries novelists like to talk about,” he says of the charismatic nonagenarian who spends her days reminiscing about her love life, admonishing her carers and despairing at her sons. “She arrived fully formed in my imagination. I knew what she looked like. I’ve never enjoyed writing about a character more.”
Beryl’s male counterpoint is Shimi Carmelli, the most eligible ninety-something in north London.
“I wanted to write a comedy of age and how it’s all humiliation,” says Jacobson. “I planned to write about someone in his seventies but then I thought: ‘If I had any balls I’d make him older’.”
Shimi is haunted by humiliating childhood experiences and Jacobson says: “As a novelist, you write out of feeling horrified by yourself, or at least acute embarrassment. I saw early on that comedy was the way of surmounting life’s multitude of mortifications.”
In recent years, Jacobson’s novels have become more explicitly serious, although he has long argued for the seriousness of comedy: “You can laugh people into truth.”
He regrets writing his novella Pussy (2017) – “that bloody squib about Trump” – but Shylock is Thy Name (2016) and J (2014) were weightier than anything else he had produced.
In 2010, he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, but says: “J and Kalooki Nights are my best novels. I would have much rather J had won.”
For 19 years, Jacobson wrote a weekly column for The Independent. He misses it and believes it was good for his fiction, perhaps because it was a place to put his views. Currently he is writing two novels, a play and a memoir.
At the end of our conversation, he returns to Beryl: “For the first time, the centre of one of my novels is a woman.
“I thought I didn’t need to be able to write about women, because Jane Austen couldn’t write about men. But writing about Beryl freed me. I was able to say all kinds of things I couldn’t otherwise say in this climate. I’m hoping that zest will be felt in the writing of Beryl.”
“Writing about Beryl freed me. I was able to say all kinds of things I couldn’t otherwise say in this climate.”
HOWARD JACOBSON