KALOOKI NIGHTS
by Howard Jacobson
Jonathan Cape ₤17.99, 480 pages
V.S. Pritchett once identified in the novels of Saul Bellow a strain of comedy tinged with “fatality”. He called it the comedy of “human undress and nakedness”. Howard Jacobson, I suspect, would approve of the formulation.
Comedy, as Jacobson understands and practises it, is not so much a source of consolation as a way of measuring the distance between how things are and how they might have been.
His middle-aged protagonists tend to be connoisseurs of disappointment: Henry Nagel, the central character in his previous novel, The Making of Henry, is “gorging on morbidity” teaching literature in a dismal former polytechnic. Jacobson’s characters are also furiously priapic and invariably Jewish, these two attributes fusing memorably in Henry’s appalled self-questioning: “Was Henry’s Jewishness his dick? Was Henry’s dick his Jewishness?”
Jacobson has been compared with Philip Roth for this triple preoccupation with sex, death and Jewishness. But such comparisons rather flatter Jacobson: he is certainly a gifted phrase-maker, but sometimes seems addicted to his own fluency and funniness, essentially a voluptuary of complaint.
Max Glickman, the narrator of Jacobson’s new novel Kalooki Nights (”kalooki” is the card game that Max’s mother plays with her friends), is also Jewish, also suffering a failing career (as a cartoonist) and is a veteran of two failed marriages - both to Gentiles. Max shares with Henry Nagel a 1950s upbringing in Jewish North Manchester (the familiar Jacobsonian analogue to Roth’s Newark). Henry, like other Jacobson protagonists, remembers Crumpsall, Cheetham Hill and Heaton Park only as a stifling, transplanted shtetl from which he sought the earliest possible escape. But Max is an altogether different, more tender, memoirist of his own past.
He is alienated not by religiosity but by his father’s secularism, which seems to the adolescent Max dangerously like a kind of “self-abuse”. Jack Glickman is a secular, leftwing boxing fanatic (his heroes are pre-war Jewish boxers such as “Slapsie” Maxie Rosenbloom) who spars with his son in the back yard instead of having him barmitzvahed. And while his father rambles in the Pennines with assorted “socialists and Fabians and Bundists”, Max stays at home poring over The Scourge of the Swastika, a book about the Holocaust that he swapped for a bundle of comics with his friend Manny Washinsky.
Manny and Max eschew games of street cricket, preferring to discuss the death camps and to plan a cartoon history of the Jews and anti-semitism. Five Thousand Years of Bitterness would be published 20 years later, bearing only Max’s name, in the “pro-Yiddler glow” of the raid on Entebbe, a climate of Jewish self-assertion that ensured the book fell stillborn from the presses.
By that time, Manny was in prison for murdering his parents - he gassed them. Max’s recollections of his childhood friend are prompted by the intervention of a television company that wants to turn Manny’s story into a film. He is asked to write a treatment and Jacobson uses Max’s reminiscences both as a means of excavating Manny’s motives (which are properly disclosed only at the end) and as a prism through which to filter his preoccupation with the vicissitudes of English-Jewish identity.
The novel is beautifully structured and Max’s first-person narration is the perfect vehicle for exploring a thought expressed in Jacobson’s previous book: that “in America the Jews had taken on a version of the national identity [and] had made the American cause their own”, yet in England, they had struggled merely for the right to be left alone.
