Nothing new to say in story of later-life affair
The title of Howard Jacobson’s 17th novel comes from the famous last line of Philip Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb: “What will survive of us is love”. Larkin wrote the poem after seeing two medieval statues lying together with their hands joined in Chichester Cathedral. Jacobson’s novel is about the bond between Sam, a celebrated playwright, and documentary maker Lily, who are both in their forties, and both in relationships with other people, when they meet in 1995.
The literary references do not stop as Jacobson quotes Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare and many more canonical writers. He can do this because Sam and Lily are both Oxbridge graduates and Lily is making a series of films about “writers in exile”.
Lily persuades Sam to present a film about DH Lawrence’s time in New Mexico, so they go to Taos together, spend a steamy few days in her hotel room and, predictably, fall in love.
When Sam returns to London, he is taken by surprise when his wife Selena meets him at the airport: “She ran towards him, and threw out her arms, and kissed his face fervently, and looked as elegant, in a long Spanish Riding School coat and an insolently tilted trilby, as he had ever seen her.”
In 2024, it is perhaps only in a Jacobson novel that a man could come home from a fortnight away with his lover to be met not by his hurt, angry or resentful wife but by one who is prepared to dress up to win him back.
Selena’s desperation only emboldens Sam to continue his affair with Lily and, while the documentary series stalls, their relationship gets more intense and much kinkier.
Sam is dismissive of “the tacky literature of S&M” but, when he and Lily try “‘masquerading”, he finds he enjoys being submissive and they are soon dressing up in masks and corsets to go to “Home Counties Sodoms”. Suffice to say Selena’s efforts are not enough to break up the “lubricious lovers” and, eventually, Sam and Lily get married. The novel becomes more elegiac as they age together and face their own mortality. Jacobson delights in describing his affluent, metropolitan characters’ lives, their clothes, large houses, frequent holidays, brilliant careers and passionate trysts. Jacobson is 81, and there is still plenty of vim in his prose. He can be wise, too: “The nervous schoolboy never leaves the grown man altogether. He is every man’s secret.”
Jacobson still has a lot to say, but he has said it all before and he never changes his mind. We know what to expect from his novels with their literary references, mini-essays on the meaning of comedy and, recently at least, the reactionary attitudes that purport to challenge consensus but really just trivialise things that Jacobson does not appear to understand.
For example, after describing one of Lily and Sam’s S&M games as “a dissolution of what ‘he’ and ‘she’ meant”, Jacobson can’t resist adding: “It could be said that they were pioneers in the probing of pronouns.” Jacobson, who won the Booker Prize for The Finkler Question (2010) and came close again with the brilliant and profound J (2014), is at his best when he surprises his readers by writing fiction that transcends his cleverness. His previous novel, Live a Little (2019), was an unexpectedly delightful meditation on old age.
There is nothing surprising about What Will Survive of Us. Jacobson sounds like a parody of himself and, while it will entertain his loyal fans, it feels like the work of a writer who has the need to write rather than one that you need to read.