‘Somebody buy me a yarmulke’ – The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (Contains a Spoiler!)

Julian Treslove has been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack. Or so he thinks. The problem is, he’s not even Jewish. But his two best friends are – Sam Finkler, former schoolmate, philosopher and author, and Libor Sevick, their former teacher. Sam and Libor have both been recently widowed, and Julian’s feeling left out – whilst the other two debate Israel and Zionism and mourn their wives, all Julian’s got is a string of ex-girlfriends, an uninspiring job as a celebrity look-a-like, and a brace of sons he doesn’t care to remember. So when, in the midst of this melancholic mid-life crisis, he’s mistaken for a Jew, he decides he might as well embrace a whole new identity. He learns Hebrew, studies Jewish history, meets a Jewish woman and gets a job in a Jewish museum. But will this satisfy his need to belong?

In the grand old tradition of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Jacobson takes male friendship, sexual desire and Judaism, and mixes them all up in a three-hundred page stew of social mishap, neurotic distress and antagonistic politics.  The ‘Finkler Question’ is how Julian Treslove frames the ‘Jewish Question’ – what does it mean to be a Jew and what does it mean to have a Jewish state? The characters all struggle with their relationships to Judaism – Julian wonders if he can ever be properly accepted in the Jewish community, while panicking that he might be secretly anti-Semitic; Sam’s (now deceased) wife converts to Judaism in order to please her husband; Sam himself is an anti-Zionist, irreligious and self-termed ‘Ashamed Jew’. Jacobson manages to cram the book with almost every conceivable facet of purportedly Jewish identity – whether it be ethnic, religious or cultural – in order to gently mock those who try to nail down the ‘Jewish experience’. He’s nothing if not comprehensive, and he lays out the Palestine/Israel situation in very clear layman’s terms. So it’s erudite – but it’s a novel, after all, not a sociological survey. Does it work?

Well, The Finkler Question is supposed to be a comic novel, but the humour – and the characters and plot – always seem to take second place to the politics. There are plenty of jokes, sure, but they’re definitely not Woody Allen-esque belly-laughs. The trials of Julian and his cohorts serve mainly as vehicles for the author’s grand (and very clever) cultural mapping, with the characters thrown headlong into the paths of various convenient ‘Jewish’ situations that exemplify different parts of the culture that Jacobson wants to demonstrate. Julian goes to a Seder and gets confused, he watches YouTube videos of an old man trying to reverse his circumcision, and his girlfriend’s workplace is pathetically vandalised with strips of bacon from the supermarket. The book reads at times more like a manual or a cultural introduction to Judaism than a sojourn in a fully realised fictional world. It’s not that it’s very dry, and it’s not that it completely fails to entertain, but for me, it just never quite got there in terms of reader involvement. I found it hard to really care whether Julian found fulfilment, or whether Sam could reconcile his secular lifestyle with his religious upbringing. I wasn’t even especially moved when (spoiler alert!) Libor finally kills himself.  That probably makes me sound very callous, but as far as I was concerned, the characters were all simply mouth-pieces for different ideological positions, with Julian standing in for the curious Gentile observer, and the other two at educational loggerheads over Tel Aviv and the Gaza Strip.

Of course, you might want to disregard my opinion here. I’m a Jacobson virgin, so maybe it’s a stylistic conflict of interest. I’ve had Kalooki Nights (2007) recommended to me more than once, and both that novel and The Finkler Question have made it onto Booker longlists. Perhaps there’s some essential quality that’s passed me by. But what I found in this novel was a diagram of political and cultural positions laid out in fictional form, peopled with characters that failed to charm or interest, and written in language that failed to sparkle. Jacobson’s prose is awkward and dull and imprecise. Listen:  ‘But beyond the reality something beckoned.’ Something? Really? ‘The newly married Mrs Finkler was not in fact beautiful but she was as good as beautiful.’ Or: ‘In poker he could do what he couldn’t do in grief – he could forget himself. In winning he could forget himself even more.’  Even more, eh?  This isn’t award winning fiction – it’s lazy writing.

Any Cop?: I thought it was an intelligent and well-constructed piece of cultural dissection that fails to entertain as storytelling. If you’re very curious about Jewish culture and Zionism, it’ll answer some questions, and if you’re already a Jacobson fan, I’m sure it’ll scratch an itch.  Otherwise?  Back to Bellow, Roth and Allen.  Somebody buy me a yarmulke –  I’ll eat it if this gets to the Booker shortlist.

Valerie O’Riordan