Howard Jacobson’s new novel is a satire on modern literary publishing seen through the eyes of a writer, Guy, who wants to sleep with his mother-in-law even though he’s married to a stunner famed for her casseroles and ‘street blow jobs’ (that’s what it says). Things happen in it not to feed the story but to feed punchlines: Guy’s agent dies backpacking in the Hindu Kush only so Jacobson can say that ‘a literary agent going missing was too common an occurrence to attract speculation’.
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