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The Finkler Question

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Where's the wit?

THE FINKLER QUESTION
By Howard Jacobson
Bloomsbury. 370 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 1 408 809 938

Never again will I believe an iota of the critical quotes on a book’s cover.

‘I don’t know a funnier writer’, says Jonathan Safran Foer, and, ‘Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding’, says The Guardian of 2010’s Booker prize-winning The Finkler Question. After trudging through the 370 pages, I can’t agree at all.

So why has such a book won our most prestigious prize? Why did all the newspaper reviews hail Jacobson as ‘the greatest novelist working in Britain’ (interesting to note that readers’ reviews on Amazon average at 1 stars out of five)? I don’t have all the answers to this, but Jacobson seems to scratch the itches of the London media crowd. This is a metropolitan book with all the in-jokes that entails. It is a self-consciously clever and angry swipe at some of our culture’s problems.

Jews and Gentiles

Judaism, identity and death are the themes of this novel. Treslove, the central character, is a Gentile. He works for a celebrity doubles agency, appearing as Leonardo DiCaprio, or Brad Pitt, or Colin Firth at functions (a fitting metaphor for his lack of self-assurance), slips from one romantic involvement to another and yearns for the high drama of bereavement. His two Jewish friends have both recently been bereaved; Finkler, of whom Treslove has always been jealous, a repellent media-academic, has lost the wife he couldn’t be bothered to be faithful to; Libor, in his 80s, has lost the wife he adored.

After a mugging, which he takes to be an anti-Semitic incident, Treslove decides that he should re-invent himself as a Jew, and finds a Jewish mistress. At the same time, Finkler joins a group called ASHamed Jews to protest against the actions of Israel, and Libor sinks into lethargy.

Had these characters been finely drawn, the book shorter, or the plot more dynamic, then it might have been a successful novel. The themes are certainly interesting enough. But Jacobson maintains a mannered style, which, though it is witty, leaves the characters close to stereotype or satire. For all their problems, they are distant from the reader, so there can be no sympathy, therefore, and the climax, when it comes, seems dull, confused and unfair. Sad, but not tragic; witty, but not funny.

Sarah Allen