The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson
Jacobson’s main character is besieged by emotional woes; the second sentence of the novel is, “His life had been one mishap after another.” Unfortunately, Julian Treslove and his mishaps (particularly those involving women) were too doggedly offbeat to be credible. For example, Julian is employed by a theatrical agency as a double for famous people at parties, conferences, etc. “Treslove didn’t look like anybody famous in particular, but looked like many famous people in general, and so was in demand if not by virtue of verisimilitude, at least by virtue of versatility.” (Of course, we never see Treslove plying his trade.) The crucial event comes early, when Treslove is robbed on a London street. The person who mugs him is a woman, and she says something Treslove finds unintelligible. At first he thinks her words were “Your jewels,” but after interminable contemplation he becomes convinced that she said, “You Jew.” This is used as a jumping off point: Treslove (who isn’t Jewish) begins to think of himself as being a Jew. The Finkler Question is really the Jewish Question. When Finkler and his wife argue (which is all they do) it’s over his ASHamed Jews movement; Jacobson even manages to make Treslove’s affair with Finkler’s wife revolve around Jewishness. I’m not interested in that subject per se (and per se was all there was), and what was left? Only one of the characters was appealing (an old fellow named Libor Sevcik, who is relegated to the sidelines); I found nothing humorous in a book that was (I suppose) meant to be a comic romp; the bluntness of the sex scenes made me yearn for women who have a modicum of modesty in words and actions (something mighty hard to find in today’s fiction). After I quit this Booker Prize-winner I did a bit of research on Jacobson and found that through a long and successful career his bread and butter issue has been Jewishness (his latest novel is entitled J). As an experiment I glanced through the half of The Finkler Question that I hadn’t read, opening it twenty times at random, and not once did I come across a page without references to you-know-what. I’ll do it again, right now. Okay, page 220 of the hardback edition: “He doesn’t say, the Jews misleading the world again, but only an uncomplaining fool, happy to be unforeskinned, could miss the implication.” This excerpt conveniently brings up something else that I wasn’t interested in but that gets a lot of attention: the state of penises.

Look at the Harlequins! – Vladimir Nabokov
If you’re not a Nabokov afficionado, don’t bother with this book; I am, and I found it enjoyable. It’s framed as an autobiography of a emigre Russian writer named Vadim; his novels are listed, and all of them are Nabokov’s novels assigned new names (it was fun to figure out which was which). Nabokov is playing a game with the reader; he mixes similarities in his own life with differences. Vadim is married three times before he meets the right woman; Vladimir married the right woman when he was twenty-six. What do these other wives represent? Mistakes he managed to avoid? Vadim states that “madness has been lying in wait for me behind this or that alder or boulder since infancy.” One wonders if Vladimir suffered from the same “incipient insanity.” And then there’s the Lolita connection . . . Coming from an author who some accused of having pederastic tendencies, Nabokov’s assigning that abnormality to Vadim seems like either an admission or an act of defiance. When Vadim’s eleven-year-old daughter Bel comes to live with him after a separation of many years, we get scenes like this: “She could not stop shivering, though, and I had to thrust my hands under her skirt and rub her thin body, till it glowed, so as to ward off ‘pneumonia’ which she said, laughing jerkily, was a ‘new,’ was a ‘moon,’ a ‘new moon’ and a ‘moan,’ a ‘new moan,’ thank you.” Later he claims to see “Nothing wrong or dangerous, or absurd or downright cretinous in my relationship between my daughter and me. Save for a few insignificant lapses – a few hot drops of tenderness, a gasp masked by a cough and that sort of stuff – my relations with her remained essentially innocent.” Yet Bel takes to walking around the house naked; when she appears wearing only slippers and a necklace, the woman who would be Vadim’s third wife is “flabbergasted” and has her sent away to a boarding school. Vera appears late in Vadim’s life, and is referred to only as “you” (Vera was Nabokov’s first reader, and he dedicated all his books to her). For him she represented no-nonsense Reality; I believe that she kept him stable, able to avoid the nightmare world to which he exiled so many of his fictional creations. But I may have given the impression that this is a dark and depressing work when it’s actually rather a lark. I believe that the act of writing well about even deplorable things gave Nabokov pleasure. At any rate, after suffering through half of Ada, I was grateful that my long association with him would end on a bright note; his last sentence has, appropriately, no period: “I had been promised some rum with my tea – Ceylon and Jamaica, the sibling islands (mumbling comfortably, dropping off, mumble dying away) –” Before he died Nabokov asked that the book he was working on (or, rather, doodling around with) be destroyed. But thirty years later his son Dmitri had The Original of Laura published, something which I consider an act of betrayal. I’ll close with a quote from Harlequins that describes what his craft meant to Nabokov; Vadim remembers Paris “merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the colored phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home.”