Shylock Is My Name - Howard Jacobsen

Title: Shylock Is My Name

Author: Howard Jacobsen

Publisher: Hogarth Shakespeare              

Publish date: 2016

ISBN: 978-2-701-18899-3

 

‘He had a madness, a frenzy. Had she been forced to teach what he had she’d have called it Judeolunacy.’

 

 

This piece by Booker-prize winning Jacobsen is termed a ‘re-telling’ of The Merchant of Venice, but it really isn’t. It’s a variation on a theme of. Its main thrust is the use of the question of why Antonio is ‘sad’ as a peg to hang the question of Jewish identity and self-perception on. But the book does not limit itself to simply the one play: throughout, there are constant Shakespearean references and allusions, all extremely cleverly woven in and dropped at artistic angles into the prose. Characters from the original play(s) are split, mirrored, doubled, melded and generally played with until they form entirely separate entities. I love Shakespeare. I love clever writing. Yet this book put me to sleep and was a chore to get through.

 

On the surface, the first explanation one seizes on is that, as a secularist, I really have no personal or vested interest in any way as to what Jewish identity is, where it is going, or how it affects Jews. But that’s not true. Firstly because I would be interested anyway, and secondly because I’d be perfectly happy to read about identity crisis in a fictional tribe of Martians, as long as it was engaging. The real reason is that there are NO likable characters. You simply cannot run a story where every single character could happily perish and the fictional world be none the poorer. None have mitigating factors, either. There are personal struggles, and more than enough soul-searching, but no indication at any point that any single character might become an even moderately approachable human being, no matter what moral conclusion they came to. So what’s the point?

 

Alas, not much. It feels as if it’s been written to order by a fantastic brain and a great linguist, without any real emotional grounding. The plot is ornate and careful. It’s not gripping.

 

The book did however afford me two separate pleasures. One was that as I was reading, the style struck me as extremely similar to The Finkler Question which I’d read a while back. I didn’t remember who’d written it. When I found out it was the same author I had a small thrill of critical vindication. The second pleasure was that when my 12-year-old son asked me how the book was going, and I explained the pleasure of finding this out, he nodded sagely and said: ‘Ah, that’s like when I’m watching a basketball game, and I can tell who the coach is from the moves they’re making.’ So there you go. Literary criticism = basketball coaching.

 

 

 

The Finkler Question

Title:  The Finkler Question

Author: Howard Jacobsen

ISBN: 978-1-4088-0910-5

Published: Bloomsbury

Date: 2010

Book quote:

“It was at that moment the sum total of his philosophy. Fuck it.”

The quote above it completely atypical of the diction and style of the book, but is in essence what the whole exposition boils down to. After exploring every conceivable angle of the Jewish Question, in the end we are presented with no answers, no guides, no opinion that seems ‘better’ than another. As far as the issue of Jewish identity and place in the world goes, Jacobson proffers no ‘solution’. Except perhaps that there is no solution and the question itself is inherent in Jewish existence.

The book is ostentatiously ‘literary’ in that it has virtually no plot, glacial progression and its whole soul is dedicated to stripping itself so bare it’s turned inside out several times like a distressed overcoat in the hands of a toddler. It is a delightful, funny read, and shines a kind and reflective light over proceedings; rather like the character of Libor: an old Czechoslovak Jew who has recently been widowed at the time the novel opens.

Reviewers have called it ‘blistering’, ‘furious’ and ‘terrifying’. If to be unashamed and honest is such, I guess it is.

The setting is London, and the main protagonists are three friends: Treslove, Finkler, and Libor. The latter two are Jews, the first is not. Then Treslove has an epiphany and decides he, too, is really Jewish. Then he probably decides he is probably not. And the story ends.

Howard uses Treslove’s reasoning as to why he ‘must’ be Jewish and the character’s personality as one of the tools to discuss the essence of ‘Jewishness’.

The only authorial opinion that seems to emerge from the seething discussions is that men are confused, women get on with life. This is not so much stated as actioned – in fact it’s so unbalanced a ratio of women who know what they’re doing to men who don’t you’d think there’s something going on. Tyler is Finkler’s (recently deceased) wife, who continually cuts through Finkler’s philosophical crap with near-spiteful brutality – yet puts up with it. Malkie is Libor’s (also recently deceased) wife who was an incomparable beauty, a talented musician, of high-class ancestry but of even better taste, who staved off the pathos of  dying by ‘talking dirty’ and who chose plebeian Libor over Horowitz because he made her laugh. Hepzebah is Treslove’s Nirvana of a woman who mothers him and for a while washes away his obsession with death and sorrow in a wave of earthy gusto and joi de vivre. Even Treslove’s past loves, the waif-like women he picks and adores because of their insubstantial fragility, all despair of him and leave him because of his fatuous fascination with some operatic, fatalistic view of life and romance. Tamara Krausz out-philosophers Finkler the philosopher, driving him mad with a mix of jealousy and admiration that morphs into a rather violent sexual fascination. There seems to be not a cleaning-lady in the book who doesn’t possess more common sense than the ‘best’ of the men.

And yet for all the enjoyable read, it leaves the reader disappointed with the ‘not a bang but a whimper’ ending. Perhaps it’s churlish to complain of this as it’s no doubt part of the message: nothing changes, there are no answers, the dog returns to his vomit. But it’s also a novel, and stories need structure, and that includes a head and a tail.

Great writing, engaging humour, wonderful insight and honesty. No plot, no resolution, no ending and barely any beginning that’s not a morass of the rest of the book. In all, I’d give it four moose-hoofs up out of five. Cool book but not quite sure I’d have given it the Booker - as someone else did.