This weekend, I read the first hundred-odd pages of “The Finkler Question,” by Howard Jacobson. I did this not because I had a premonition that Jacobson’s latest novel would win the 2010 Man Booker Prize this evening—as my colleagues noted last week, Tom McCarthy was such an odds-on favorite that Ladbrokes had stopped taking wagers—but because I’m a Howard Jacobson fan. I’ve been one ever since I fell for “The Mighty Walzer,” which may just be the best ping-pong coming-of-age novel of all time. Also, I’d just finished reading a new collection of stories and letters by Vasily Grossman, the earnest, precise, and moral Soviet writer who, as a war correspondent, covered Stalingrad and discovered Treblinka, and who never lived to see the publication of his masterpiece, “Life and Fate.” After Grossman, I could certainly use a laugh.
In announcing the prize, Sir Andrew Motion, the chairman of this year’s panel, mentioned that “The Finkler Question” is “funny,” and much is already being made of Jacobson having written the first “comic novel” to win a Booker. Jacobson can be ribald and play with language—in “Kalooki Nights,” the protagonist keeps falling for women with a diaeresis in their name (Zoë, Chloë, Alÿs)—but he does not write light humor. “The Finkler Question” so far is the story of three friends: two Jewish widowers and Julian Treslove, an even more mournful fellow, even though he never married and isn’t Jewish, at least when the novel begins. But as events unfold, Treslove starts to think that he might be, or that others think he is. His private word for Jew is Finkler—his schoolmate, rival, and one of the widowers. The Finkler Question, in other words, is the Jewish Question—which is also at the heart of “Kalooki NIghts,” “The Mighty Walzer,” his travelogue “Roots Schmoots” (which became a BBC series), and his opinion column for the Independent.
There will also be much talk about how Jacobson is the British Philip Roth (Darkly funny! Obsessed with Jewish identity! Dysfunctional relationships with women!). And how they are not the same writer; there are analogies (Jacobson : Manchester :: Roth : Newark) and differences (Roth has shifted his focus to his nation’s history and to mortality, while Jacobson has not moved on, or cannot). Another difference is that Roth has acquired a level of international respect and attention that Jacobson may or may not dream of, and will probably never attain. But in the past few days, Roth, once again a long shot for the Nobel Prize, did not win, and Jacobson, another dark horse, has won the Booker.
Let’s hope that this recognition for “The Finkler Question,” which was published in the United States today, gets Jacobson the recognition he deserves—not as a comic novelist, or a Jewish novelist, or a British Philip Roth—but on his own terms.
