Readers Place

Howard Jacobson interview/review

Still angry after all these years

Howard Jacobson was in a rage when he wrote his new novel, but he also thinks it is his finest. In his first interview before publication, he explains why

Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape £17.99), Jacobson’s ninth novel, is the story of two friends, Max Glickman and Manny Washinsky, who grow up in Crumpsall Park, Manchester. As boys, they spend a lot of time hiding in an old air-raid shelter looking at a book about the Final Solution. Fixated on the crimes committed against his people, but unable to live a conformist, suburban Jewish life, Max moves away, marries out and, as a cartoonist, forges a career drawing strips about Jewish suffering.

Then his friend Manny is released from jail, having served a long sentence for gassing his Orthodox parents. The two get in touch again and, slowly, Max is drawn back into the world he thought he had left behind, a world in which it was forbidden for Manny’s brother to love a half-German Gentile, with disastrous consequences. Like all Jacobson’s books, it’s dark and funny. But it’s also an extended meditation on belonging: it speaks to, and is a product of, the turbulent times in which we live.

1. Was he aware of this as he wrote it?

‘Yes, without doubt. One of the things that had been preoccupying me was whether people are talking about Jews differently now. When I finished my last book, I thought: I’m not going to do another Jewish novel. We’re not exotic any more. People are a bit sick of us; we’re a bit sick of ourselves. Then, one day, I woke up and I thought: why not? I know that world and I like it. In that sense, this is my most Jewish book ever. Jew, Jew, Jew – the word’s in every sentence. Look, I married out myself. That’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is Jews who are frightened, faint-hearted, hiding. This book is very angry with Jews. I was in a rage as I wrote it.’

1. And does he think that people are talking about Jews differently? Is anti-semitism on the rise?

‘My grandmother’s grave in Manchester was desecrated. That was very upsetting, but that would have been thugs. I worry far more about left-wing intellectuals talking about Israel. I don’t think we’re living in the Weimar Republic; I just think you have to watch it. The university lecturers who are boycotting Israel – they make my blood boil. And there are Holocaust deniers around. I’ve met some of them.’

After 9/11, he sat in his Soho loft, gazing at the rooftops of London and was convinced he would see the same thing happen here. But, as he points out, that anxiety had nothing to do with being Jewish; everyone was, and still is, prey to that worry. Then again, whenever he writes about Israel, hate mail always follows. Recently, he got some, signed in excrement and God knows what else, that was so vile his wife called in the police. ‘The police did not think that we were making a big fuss about nothing.’

His own relationship with Judaism is typically perverse.

1. Does he believe in God?

‘No! But I can’t stand atheism.’

1. Does he go to synagogue?

‘Yes, but I don’t like it.’

1. Why not?

‘The words… it’s just endlessly praising God. What kind of God would want you to do that?’A male God? He snorts. Jacobson was born in Manchester, where his father was a market trader; his family was not at all religious. Even so, they were upset when he married a non-Jew. ‘And now I’ve married for the third and final time [to a TV producer, Jenny de Yong], and I’ve married in.’ Is he, then, slowly coming back to all the stuff on which he turned his back as a young man? ‘I know what you’re saying, but I like to think that it’s an intellectual thing, rather than a product of old age. You can’t be horrified by people who refuse to marry out without also seeing the attraction of it. It’s pristine, somehow.’

Jacobson took a while to get going as a writer. His first novel, Coming From Behind – it is always described as a Jewish Lucky Jim – was not published until 1983, when he was in his forties. He has had many lives. First, there was Cambridge, where his tutor was FR Leavis (he still, after all these years, describes himself as a Leavisite). He was shy and couldn’t find a girl to share the crumpets he hoped to toast on the big fork that he bought at Woolies the term he went up. Then, there was Sydney, where he took up an academic post. This was ‘liberating’ – perhaps too liberating (he is reputed to have got frisky with his students, which may have contributed to the end of his first marriage to Barbara, the mother of his son).

Then, married for the second time, this time to an Australian, Rosalin, there was a miserable stint teaching English at Wolverhampton Polytechnic – ‘It was a shithole; I sat in these Indian restaurants every night eating curry and reading Coleridge’ – followed by a period in Boscastle, where Rosalin ran a craft shop. Do his failed marriages trouble him? ‘Not at all. It seems a perfectly normal thing to have happened.’ He likes being married; he likes ‘the certainty of it’, which seems a bit ironic in the circumstances.

Once he’d got over the fact that he was never going to be Tolstoy or – God forbid – Lawrence, he finally found his voice. After that, all he wanted was success as a writer and it still matters to him more than anything. He is wonderfully honest on the subject of the writerly ego. We get, inevitably, to talking about the Booker. ‘Prizes are for children,’ he wails. ‘I’m an old man. I shouldn’t have to worry about prizes. But as readers dwindle, the only glory comes from prizes.’ Writers, he tells me, are capable of making one another sick – literally. Only once, has he stopped a writer – Milan Kundera – in the street to tell him how much he admired him.

‘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.’

Let us hope, then, that this time around he gets a little glory, that some kind judge takes Kalooki Nights straight to his or her heart. Jacobson, for all that he thinks it his best book yet, isn’t hopeful. ‘I know well enough by now that when it comes out, the world won’t stop. People won’t fall down in a dead faint, though I’d like it very much if they did.’ A brief pause. ‘You know, I’m disgusted with myself for wanting that.’

Rachel Cooke Sunday June 25, 2006 The Observer