A red rag, or just bull?

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’. The gag is typical for the sense of moral and aesthetic collateral damage left in its wake.

Overstatement is key to Jacobson’s style, as if he might become a comic writer simply by being a writer you can’t take seriously. The main character in The Finkler Question sleeps with women ‘so narrow he hadn’t always known they were there when he woke. He had to search the bed for them.’