Kalooki Nights - Howard Jacobson
Kalooki Nights is perhaps the only book in the Booker 2006 longlist that would qualify as funny despite being grounded on a serious subject.
The Guardian review is both detailed and somehow, I guess the word is kind.
The misanthrope at the heart of Kalooki Nights is Max Glickman, a cartoonist who hopes that his caricatures will reveal a "greater truth". Born into an irreligious Jewish family in the 40s, he was raised in an atmosphere of sweet reason comprising "socialism, syndicalism, Bundism, trade unionism, international brotherhoodism, atheism" ad absurdum. His father, a boxing enthusiast, is a product of the "great years of secular and muscularist Judaism" when "pugilist Jews" queued up to take on Mosley's thugs. His mother, rather than confront such realities, organises Kalooki card evenings.The Observer reviewer writesThis is a welcome return to the bittersweet Yiddish-inspired humour at which Jacobson excels, and which has rightly earned him comparisons with Philip Roth. Jacobson is an acute observer of the bottomless embarrassment of Jewish adolescents who are at home neither in their families nor in the wider culture. The novel goes back to the boyhood years of Max and his two friends, Manny and Errol, who offer two extreme ways of coping with their discomfiture. Manny, as a "weird" asexual Orthodox Jew, accepts his fate and becomes the eternal isolate. The priapic Errol revels in his super-sexed Jewishness and organises an after-school "ring of onanists". What unites this unlikely trio is an unhealthy preoccupation with the Nazi death camps.
Max, growing up in Manchester's Crumpsall Park, has two childhood friends, randy Errol Tobias, who he believes leads him astray, and devout Manny Washinsky - 'not a person who responded well to pressure. Demand anything of Manny and he'd hold his breath for half-an-hour'. It is Washinsky who will gas his parents, and it is a TV company, Lipsync Productions, that commissions Max to search for his childhood friend.
This provides the spine of the novel, but along the way, everything and anything is thrown into the plot as Jacobson, in prose sharper and brighter than any of his contemporaries, worries over, struggles with and laughs at what it means to be Jewish. The marriages to Chloe, Zoe and Alys provide comic highlights but Jacobson can make you laugh with a one-word sentence just by picking the right word (for example, 'geography').
The jacket says Jacobson has won just one prize for his novels. The Everyman Wodehouse award for comic writing in 1999 brought the honour of having a pig named after him. A book about the ramifications for English Jews of the gravest injustice of the 20th century deserves to redress the injustices meted out on its author. But for that to happen, the judges will need a sense of humour.
Like his books, the only way to describe this interview with him (just before the publication of Kalooki Nights) is funny. Go read the whole thing.
On paper, Howard Jacobson is not at all my cup of tea - as a man, I mean, not as a writer. As a writer, he is everything you could wish for. His prose is clever, funny, stylish and full of learning. But as a man ... no, he should not really be my bag. For one thing, there is his temperament, which is incredibly male: part of him thinks he is the ant's pants; part of him craves praise because he fears rejection. This is always a bit tiring.
Then there is the fact that, on arrival at his swanky Soho pad, with its enormous picture window and its two paintings by Lowry, I spy what looks like a bust of his head. I'm not sure that I trust a man who keeps a bust of his own head about the place. Last of all, there is the fact that he adores DH Lawrence. Who on earth, these days, likes creepy old DH Lawrence?
But I'm teasing. Like him, I'm being contrary. Perhaps it's contagious. Actually, in person, he is adorable. He has a lovely face - prophet-like and comic at the same time, with pale green eyes the colour of those odd shards of glass that you used to find on gravestones - and he is incredibly warm and open; there is nothing you cannot ask him. He is, however, a little twitchy.
...
I'm not normally magnanimous enough to praise other people, but I really like him and he is old and he didn't look well. I did it once with John Updike, but my heart wasn't in it. I feel more generous if I'm doing well. If I'm not, I don't have any spare kindness.'
Everyone who profiles Jacobson (this old one at The Telegraph) wants to make the piece funny!
Spot him across a room and you would not guess that he is our funniest living writer. The face has a mordant grandeur, and when the eyebrows join forces on the bridge of the nose he looks like God after a bad day at the bookmaker.
Howard Jacobson on Wikipedia, his weekly columns in The Independent, a profile at Contemporary Writers, a glowing review at The Independent, the Booker forums calling Kalooki Nights more an exploration around a story than a story itself.
