Winning the Booker can do strange things. For one, critics tend to become noticeably shyer around authors with some bling in their trophy cabinets, hyperbole blunting their edge. But if ever there was a writer primed to dismantle automatic appreciation it is Howard Jacobson. Zoo Time, his first novel since The Finkler Question won the 2010 Booker Prize, does everything short of physically assaulting the reader to excuse itself from being a bland follow up. In fact, its very obnoxiousness is both its weakness and its strength.
I must confess to both liking and loathing it, pushed between extremes depending on the subject matter. (Forget narrative, simply because there isn’t one: ‘I wasn’t mad about plot’ we are rather redundantly told two-thirds of the way through). The novel encompasses two distinct themes, woven together by novelist-narrator Guy Ableman: one a very witty, almost Swiftian satire on the ‘Great Decline’ of reading and print culture; the other a rather tired attempt to water-board laughs out of Ableman’s wannabe scurrility and risqué infatuation with his mother-in-law.
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