Howard Jacobson's Zoo Time

Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize in 2010 for The Finkler Question.  I very much enjoyed this novel about Jewish identity, though it is not exactly a comedy, as it was billed.

His new novel, however, is a comedy.  Zoo Time is a boisterous satire of the publishing world. Jacobson inveighs against book groups, three-for-twos, blogs, tweeting, and the death of reading. Even if you're not in the publishing world, and I certainly am not, we all know vaguely about the merger of Random House with Penguin, print vs. e-books, defunct newspapers, and male journalists pronouncing blogs and tweets the end of civilization. 

The narrator, Guy Ableman, is a novelist without readers.  His first novel, Who Gives a Monkey?, was shortlisted for a prize, but things are going downhill.  He says it's because of the internet, his publisher's suicide, his feminist editor, and men who write popular novels about being dads.  

Guy's interactions with writing groupies and editors are trenchant and funny.  When he speaks at a book group meeting, the members ask him why he hates women so much. His feminist editor, who wears hiking clothes, tells him she is putting his books out-of-print because of print-on-demand.  He is arrested for shoplifting his own book from Oxfam.  It can't get much worse.

Much of the novel revolves around his loathing of the changes in publishing.  Here is one of his typically witty diatribes.

When did my books stop appearing in the bookshops?  Where did my oeuvre go?  My question was a general one:  every novelist in the country capable of writing sentences with conditional clauses in them was asking it.  We were all being written out of history.  Was three-for-two to blame?  Was it the celebrity memoir?  It had all happened so quickly.  Your work was on display in alphabetical order of title, spines showing...

Guy also dissects his personal life.  He is married to a beautiful woman, Vanessa, who likes to give blow jobs in alleys.  But he is more attracted to his mother-in-law, Poppy, even though she doesn't know Mrs. Gaskell from Tolstoy.

Howard Jacobson

Guy is also writing a novel about being in love with his mother-in-law, though his agent warns him the publishers won't want it.  While he writes it, Guy fantasizes that Vanessa and Poppy are sleeping around.  On a trip to Australia with them, he goes so far as to put his hand on Poppy's thigh and makes sexual overtures after he kills a spider in her hotel room.  But it doesn't work out:  it drives Poppy away, and she moves out when they return to London.  

You can tell that Guy is both in love, and not in love with women.  He used to manage his mother's glitterati clothing shop, and knows all about how they dress, and loves them for it.  But the women have to be super-feminine and spectacular.   I do like Vanessa, she is  believable and wryly witty, and she doesn't spoil Guy, whom she needs to get out of the house so she can write.  And once he is out of the house, he calls a woman in Australia he had sex with at a literary festival and invites her to England (she refuses).  

Satires are eerie.  I recognized a couple of the composite characters, in a blurry kind of way, but I only know them from literary gossip in English newspapers.  There are passing references to Virago Books.  But what I noticed is that Jacobson is not really vicious when it comes to satirizing people.  It is the publishing world he scorns.

His sardonic voice can get tiring, but he is still one of the best and boldest writers I've read this year (thanks to catching up with the Booker Prize).  I do agree with much he says about publishing, from my limited experience with newspapers (going downhill if not gone altogether), new books (hard to find a good one), and misleading reviews.  If you're inspired by a fulsome review, you have to make very sure you read the last three paragraphs, because that's where the writer's reservations are expressed.  I honestly have better luck with blogs and bookstore websites when it comes to finding new books.  (Of course there are also some critics I very much respect.)  You don't want to end up with...well, I'd better not name the books I dislike.

Literature in Literature: Sherman Alexie's Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories & Howard Jacobson's Zoo Time

Sherman Alexie's stories are always a delight. I spent a day engrossed in Alexie's brilliant new book, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories. 

Alexie, a Native American writer of fiction, poetry, and screenplays, has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the American Book Award, and the National Book Award.   In these transcendent stories, he writes about lost cats, marriage, racism, growing up on the Spokane reservation, growing up Native American in the city without the Spokane traditions, shopping at the 7-11, cancer, alcoholism, absent fathers, obituaries, and playing basketball at midnight. His lyricism illuminates difficult moments in the difficult lives of his Native American characters, but he also deftly balances their sorrow with humor.

In the first story, "Cry Cry Cry," Alexie's narrator inserts witty observations into his sad account of his cousin Junior's desolate life . Junior, a meth addict, dealer, and a war dancer,  was chosen as Head Man Dancer at the powwow "because he was charming and popular.  Powwow is like high school, except with more feather and beads." But Junior is a criminal, charged with possession after he stops dealing on the reservation and branches out to a white farming community.  When he gets out of prison, the narrator watches him go down again.

In "War Dances,"a bold, comical story divided into short chapters, interviews, and lists, the narrator goes deaf in one ear while he is caring for his sons and his wife is away.  Terrified of the health care system, he remembers the experiences of his late father in the hospital.  The narrator had trouble getting the attention of a nurse when his father needed an extra blanket; finally he was given a too-thin hospital blanket. A comical encounter with an affable Native American family in the hospital provides the warmth the nurse will not.  Alexie's sharp, realistic descriptions of family and the health care system sometimes made me laugh, sometimes gave me chills.

In my favorite story, "The Search Engine," a college student, Corliss, who grew up on the Spokane Reservation, discovers the poetry of Harlan Atwater, a Native American.  It is the first literature she has ever seen by a member of the Spokane tribe.  When she takes it to the check-out desk, the librarian says it has never been checked out, and Corliss, who loves books, wonders if it can be called a book if no one reads it.  

She loves the library, and many of you will identify with the following passage:

"The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she'd been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf.  An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death.  She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks."

(Are you putting asterisks and exclamation points next to it?)

When Corliss tracks down Harlan Atwater, he is fat, old, and unromantic.  But she gets to hear the story of his brief life as a poet, his self-publication of his poems, and his brief career as a rock star among local poets at readings. 

This book is a delight overall: most of these stories are powerful.  The only one I didn't care for was "Idolatry," a sort of prose poem about American Idol.  And it is pretty good, too.

HOWARD JACOBSON'S ZOO TIME.  I recently read and enjoyed Howard Jacobson's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Finkler Question.  He is an exuberant comic writer, and possibly a great writer, as he points out humorously in those English newspaper literary-gossip interviews which make almost everybody sound terrible.  I decided to read Zoo Time not because of the interview, but because I perused the first chapter in a bookstore and thought it funny.  The hero, Guy Ableman, a novelist, is furious about the state of publishing:  book groups don't approve of him, his books aren't suitable for "three-for-twos," and his publisher commits suicide because he is supposed to tell his writers to "twit" and "blag."

"Do you know what I am expected to require of you?" he suddenly looked me in the eyes and said.  "That you twit."

"Twit?"

"Twit, tweet, I don't know."

Then he wants to know if Guy "blags."

"Blog?  No."

"The blog's the end of everything," [Merton] said.

But Guy wants to tell Merton "the blog is yesterday," and that the blame lies on "myBlank and shitFace and whatever else was persuading the unRead to believe everybody had a right to his opinion."

The blog is yesterday! Yes.  I agree.  I hope that all will realize we are not the barbarians plundering publishing.  Our readers have gone to"myBlank and shitFace," though I don't have a clear idea of what those are.

 Guy also implies that marketers are tracking social media to discover what people like in books--vampires and the Tudors--and that is atrocious, if true, but not our fault.

And by the way, there is much more to Jacobson's book.  Guy is in love with his mother-in-law, and he's writing a novel about Little Gid, who is in love his mother-in-law.  I'll write more about this mother-in-law another time.

Catching up on the Booker Prize: Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question

If Jacobson lived here, he'd order from Amazon.

Today at Barnes and Noble, I perused a chapter of Howard Jacobson's Zoo Time.  According to The Guardian, it is "a "400-page tantrum against book groups, Amazon, the Kindle,...vampire books," etc. I hardly think Jacobson would approve of my blogging, but I did enjoy The Finkler Question.  We do what we have to do to support our book habit (this isn't London or New York), and that includes reading Ann Patchett's  State of Wonder, i.e.,  Conrad for Girls, for book groups; shopping at Amazon; reading e-books on apparati, as Gary Sheyngart calls them; and, yes, it's the end of civilization.

Jacobson's The Finkler Question won the Man Booker Prize in 2010.  It is a comedy, everyone said.  I was expecting Lucky Jim, or possibly Portnoy's Complaint.

I did not expect a novel about Jewish identity. I am Catholic, and though that is another religion with strange rites, vestments, a penchant for foreign language (Latin till Vatican 2), and titanic amounts of guilt,  I have alienated so many Catholics with my criticisms that I am leery of talking about  The Finkler Question.    I am sure there is a great Catholic novel that parses Catholicism in the same way The Finkler Question parses Jewishness, but I am not familiar with it.  The closest I have come to analyzing  great Catholic literature is probably Flannery O'Connor's short story, "Parker's Back," and that is symbolic, mostly about Christ and tattoos.

Although the characters in The Finkler Question are comical, Jacobson somberly analzyes Jewish ethnicity, religion, stereotypes, anti-Semites, Israel, Palestine, Nazis, sex, and death.  One of the main characters, Julian Treslove, a gentile ex-BBC producer who works as a movie star lookalike, is envious of his smart Jewish friends.  He refers to Jews as Finklers, because his friend, Sam Finkler, the famous Jewish author of philosophy-cum-self-help books with titles like The Socratic Flirt:  How to Reason Your Way to a Better Sex Life, is annoyingly brillaint and successful, as Jews are supposed to be. Libor, their former teacher, who spent time in Hollywood, is also a Jew. And after Julian is mugged by a woman--he fantasizes first that she called him "You Ju" for Julian, and then that she called him a Jew--he decides to be Jewish.

The early chapters about Julian are acridly funny:  he is a romantic, never marries, and is the indifferent father of two sons by  girlfriends who left him when they were pregnant.  

But the humor isn't light.

"Though it wasn't Kristallnacht, the unprovoked attack on him for being a Jew had become in Treslove's imagination little short of an atrocity.  He admitted to himself that he was overexcited.  The night with Kimberley, her misattribution of Jewish characteristics to him, as a consequence of which, he was bound to consider, he might just have had--at forty-nine!--the best sex of his life (well, at least they had both smiled during it), and the sense of history swirling around him, all made him an unreliable witness to his own life."

Finkler and Libor are new widowers, and when they spend time together alone, they talk about being Jewish.

"Oh, here we go, here we go.  Any Jew who isn't your kind of Jew is an anti-Semite.  It's a nonsense, Libor, to talk of Jewish anti-Semites.  It's more than a nonsense, it's a wickedness."

Finkler is narcissistic:  he founds Ashamed, a group of Jews ashamed of Israel's involvement with Palestine.

Libor is the saddest of the three, the one to whom being Jewish means the most, and the one who finds it hardest to adjust without his wife.

One of our questions throughout the book is:  will Julian remain Jewish?

It is an exuberant, beautifully-written, sometimes rambunctiously entertaining novel with undertones of gloom.  I look forward to reading some of his earlier fiction, like the novel that won the P. G. Wodehouse Award.